How hard is it for the police to get a search warrant

In My Humble Opinion
1

Let me start by saying I have done nothing illegal.

Having said that:

I saw an ad in the paper for someone selling an appliance for $100. I called the guy up and agreed to meet him after work. While I am there he tells me he is a detective who is off today. I pay him a $100 bill and walk to my car.

He yells at me as I am getting my car and tells me my money is counterfeit. He says he won’t take me in or arrest me, but that it is counterfeit (this money came new from a bank as far as I know, and I got it from my parents, so I doubt that).

So I offer him two $50 bills instead. He says those are counterfeit too. How he knows this, I have no idea.

Suffice to say, the money is very likely not counterfeit. I got it from my parents who got it new from a bank. My parents gave it to me as a christmas present (I have some left over, they give me a few hundred in 50s and 100s as a christmas gift). I have taken it to banks and stores w/o problem before.

But now I’m worried the cop may want to get a search warrant for my apartment based on his ‘probable cause’. Again, I’ve done nothing illegal, but I don’t want a bunch of cops ripping through my apartment and tearing everything up, or all my neighbors thinking I’ve done something. Sure i’ll add to my credibility as a badass and all, but I don’t want to have to deal with that crap.

So what should I do now? The guy has no evidence other than his ‘hunch’ that I am using counterfeit money, which is bullshit. But if he wants to, can he go to a judge and swear under oath that I tried to give him fake money and end up ransacking my apartment and car?

Should I report him to internal affairs? Being arrested (which he claimed he could’ve done) comes up on some background checks. So I could’ve ended up having trouble getting jobs in the future because of that. When I applied to be an english teacher in Korea they didn’t want a background check for convictions, they wanted one for arrests. But I’m sure he is within his rights as a cop to do what he did.

Lawyers are damn expensive. Esp when you’ve done nothing illegal and are just paranoid about assholes.

2

Are you sure he’s a cop? Sounds like bullshit to me, and a scam as well. But suppose they actually are counterfeit, and he’s actually a cop. He would have to provide the bills in order to convince a judge to issue a warrant, and show that you are knowingly trying to pass counterfeit bills. Otherwise, it’s his word against yours. Don’t sweat it. I don’t know what his game is, but you should take the bills to your nearest bank and ask them to test the bills. They’ll confiscate them if they’re fake, but you will at least not be arrested for trying to pass them elsewhere. Then let your parents know so they can tell the bank and get them replaced.

3

We emailed back and forth, and I googled the name associated with the email along with the city he says he is a police officer in. There is a police officer in that city with his name, but no photo I can find.

I’m wondering if going to a bank, getting the money tested and if it comes back clean, reporting him to internal affairs is a good idea. An arrest (including a false arrest) would fuck up my background checks in the future. But you can’t report the police everytime they think they have probable cause either. Cops have a hard job. I am drawn.

4

Are you sure he gave you back the same bill you gave him?

5

Pretty sure. Good question.

With the $100 bill, I was walking away from him when he stopped me. He could’ve easily traded it for a different $100 bill when I was walking away and since I didn’t memorize the serial number, it could be a different bill. There is no telling if he stashed my $100, pulled out a different $100 and gave it back to me. But the bill ‘appeared’ the same in the sense that it had the same level of wear and tear, and the same design (money changes design all the time). Aside from that though, no idea. However that would require alot of planning. He’d have to know I was using a $100 bill so he could store a phony, have to have one stashed that was in the same condition and had the same design, etc.

However the $50s, I’m 99% certain those are the same as he only handled those in front of me. Unless he is david copperfield or something.

6

Report him to internal affairs for what?

7

That is the problem. He has probable cause. But an arrest would look bad on my record when I go in for jobs. I don’t know if I would’ve been able to teach had I had an arrest on my record (even w/o a conviction). But probable cause to get an arrest can be as easy as hearsay.

I don’t know if excessive use of probable cause is considered something police aren’t allowed to do, or if what happened would even be defined as that.

8

Did he use one of those marking pens, did he hold it up to the light/sun to see if it had the appropriate thread in it? How did he ‘know’ it was counterfeit. Did he confiscate your supposedly counterfeit money? If so, I think you were scammed.
I know that whomever is caught with counterfeit $ loses it, so if counterfeiter goes to the bank & give them a bogus bill in a deposit & you’re in line behind scammer to cash a check/make a withdrawal & teller give you said bogus bill, if you’re caught with it, it’s your loss. That being said, you would hardly be the first person to get passed bogus bills. If he passes it on, it’d probably be Secret Service who’d investigate. They might come have a chat with you, but w/o any evidence that you were doing anything illegal (ie. printing the bills yourself), I doubt you’d be arrested.
Also remember that being arrested isn’t the same as charges being filed. PD can arrest you but DA/US Attorney can decide to not prosecute.

9

He smelled it. I have no idea how he could tell by smell. The money had none of those pen marks on it.

Arrested and convicted aren’t the same thing. But the US is becoming a weak police state with massive surveillance of citizens and their backgrounds. So even an arrest for something you haven’t done could cause problems years down the road for things like finding jobs or renting. Plus some people just plea to false charges to avoid thousands in legal fees or having to face juries that would ‘convict a ham sandwich’. I have very little faith in the US legal system.

FWIW, I’m assuming that since he gave me the money back he had no intention of following this up. Had he planned on doing that he would’ve kept the money as evidence.

10

Also, I’m forgetting that the process is (from what I know) detention-arrest-convict

So the police can detain you w/o arresting you, and they can arrest you w/o convicting you. A detention won’t show up on a background check (if so everyone who has ever been stopped at a traffic stop or interrogated would have that show up).

I’m paranoid. I’m still getting the money checked out to make sure he didn’t switch them out or make sure they really aren’t fraudulent.

11

OK. You are correct that you’re being paranoid. It seems like you would be very well served by slowing down a bit. Unless I’m missing something, it seems to me very likely that you’re making a mountain out of a molehill here. He didn’t actually do anything; correct?

To unpack the details a bit, which hopefully will help: no, there isn’t such a thing as excessive use of probable cause. But I wouldn’t worry about it, because assuming everything you said is what happened, and you didn’t leave something important out, based on your story he didn’t have probable cause. Probable cause requires some kind of factual basis. It has to be reasonable. It’s one thing to have little faith in the system, but it’s another to assume that the exact things the system is set up to prevent are going to happen to you. There’s rules about this sort of thing, I promise.

12

He’s probably a cop, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t also lying. If he’d really thought it was counterfeit, he would have wanted to keep it to keep you from spending it, especially by the second set. The fact that he didn’t implies heavily that it was just an excuse not to sell the item to you. Even if he didn’t have probable cause, he still would know that you had counterfeit money and not want it in circulation.

If you are saying he contacted you later about it, that makes it a little more likely that he was sincere. But, unless your parents counterfeit or unknowingly get their money from a counterfeiter, it is unlikely that both sets were counterfeit, so if the guy was serious, he is horribly misinformed.

And that might be something you’d want to tell on him for–just an anonymous tip to make sure the cops there know how to actually check money for being counterfeit. I am unaware of a smell test, that’s for sure.

13

This event only happened an hour and a half ago. He hasn’t contacted me since, but no he didn’t keep the bills. He would’ve kept the bills had he wanted to follow up on this.

Jimmy Chitwood, my knowledge of the legal system only goes as deep as an intro to criminal justice class I took in college and what I’ve gleaned on the internet. But I thought a cops say-so was considered ‘probable cause’. And I thought ‘probable cause’ was all you need to get an arrest or a warrant.

I was under the impression that (as an example) if a woman goes to the police and says ‘so and so raped me’ or if someone goes to the police and says ‘so and so sold drugs to me’, with just their hearsay, that is probable cause to arrest. I was also under the impression that if a cop thinks your money is counterfeit, that is probable cause for an arrest. I really don’t know the law too well. Probable cause seems like ‘pornography’ or ‘terrorism’ in the sense that it is a subjective term whose definition varies person to person. I have read probable cause requires ‘factual evidence, not just suspicion’. But I don’t know the difference. What is the difference between seeing someone sneak around a house (suspecting they are breaking in) vs factual evidence they are trying to break in (seeing someone sneak around a house)?

14

There is a news story currently going around about a waitress who was given a $12,000 tip. the police confiscated the money because they said it ‘smelled like marijuana’.

Stories like this are why I don’t trust the po-po. I think they are just keeping her money under drug forfeiture laws because they’d rather have the 12k for themselves than let the waitress keep it. But with news stories like that it is hard not to think ‘probable cause’ or ‘reasonable suspicion’ are basically BS and all that really matters is hearsay and whatever a cop says and writes down, true or not.

Of course of the 800k cops in America, there are always going to be a few bad apples. You don’t hear stories about the 700k good ones, just the 100k bad ones.

15

A cop’s say-so only gives rise to probable cause if it’s reasonable, and it’s only reasonable if he’s got a reason. You’ve got a magistrate sitting at a desk somewhere, and a police officer comes to him with an affidavit. The magistrate looks at this affidavit and reads it, and he comes to a common sense decision: based on everything I see here, is there a “fair probability” that we’re going to find evidence of criminal activity at this place? It’s pretty flexible to allow for the fact that cops aren’t lawyers and often don’t really give a shit about technicalities, but it’s definitely the case that a cop can’t just say “Yeah, that shit was counterfeit” and get a warrant based on that.

You need to have “facts supported by oath or affirmation,” and those have to convince the magistrate that it’s reasonable to go looking for evidence of a crime. The distinction is between “a cop thinks my money is counterfeit” and “a cop thinks my money is counterfeit because…”. And the part that comes after the because is the part that’s going to determine whether probable cause exists. From what you’ve said, there’s no because here. Probable cause to arrest you is the same question, but you ask it about whether the person’s committing a crime right now. So based on whatever facts the officer had at his disposal at the time, could a reasonable person have thought you were committing a crime? From what you’ve said, it would appear you think not. So there’s probable cause to arrest out the window.

I’m sure it’s terrible that they’re keeping that lady’s money, but it’s a pretty impressive leap to get from that to determining that a 220 year old rule that’s a fundamental underpinning of our criminal justice system is completely substanceless.

16

Even if he had no probable cause, I am still drawn on whether I should file an internal affairs report.

If he is a detective (he told me he was a detective), that is a position that usually requires years of service as a patrolman to reach. So if he was honest about that, I am assuming he has 10+ years as a police officer at this point. I found his behavior to be really unprofessional and untrained, esp for a detective who should be held to a higher standard than a rookie patrol cop. Assuming every time you see a $50 or $100 bill, that means it is fake is no different (to me) than the assumption that every time you see a person driving a car, he must’ve stolen it.

This is assuming he actually thought my money was fake, and wasn’t just using that as an excuse not to sell the item to me.

What is the risk of retaliation? He is going to know who filed the report since we emailed back and forth before this and know each others names.

17

You seem obsessed with IA. Get the damn bill looked at by someone who knows what the hell he’s looking at. Otherwise, you have nothing but a baseless accusation against somebody with a shitload of friends with guns and grudges. Even if the bill turns out to be fine, I’d leave it alone. All the cop has to say is that he was suspicious of the bills, and he’s off the hook. You, on the other hand, will now have earned the enmity of a bunch of people who can harass you in subtle ways.

18

If he was going to do anything about it, you can bet he wouldn’t give you your $ back & let you go on your way to pass your supposedly counterfeit bills somewhere else.

  1. he was a scam artist trying to swipe from you - this is not the case, since he gave your your back.
  2. He could have called for an on-duty cop to confiscate $; he didn’t do this.
  3. (most-likely scenario) after you made arrangements to come over he either got a higher offer to sell it, or relative/neighbor’s failed & he was going to give/sell it to them.
    In short, I wouldn’t worry about it.

After all, it didn’t pass the smell test! :smiley:
I also saw the story about the waitress’s $12m, & have previously heard that the majority of non-new bills in this country will test positive for drug residue.

19

Attempting to pass counterfeit bills is a crime. If he had a reasonable belief that you were a counterfeiter he could have arrested you, had the bills tested, and then had your apartment searched while you were in custody. The fact that he did not arrest you seems to be an admission on his part that his suspicion was not reasonable enough to base a search warrant on. Furthermore, even if he wanted to get a search warrant the fact that he gave you back the bills undermines the basis for his warrant. I would not worry about him doing anything to you.
As for reporting him, as long as he did not try to threaten you or intimidate you I would forget about that. If he was just being rude, nothing will happen to him and it would be a waste of your time and the taxpayer’s money.

20

File an internal report. However, you won’t find that person at the police station. He was a fraud. He took your original 100 bill, and gave you back a fake one. He didn’t take the 50s, because whatever the appliance was, he was keeping for a scam in the next city, next victim, whatever.
Your money will test counterfeit if you take it anywhere.

Your 99% certainty has made somebody 100 dollars richer.
Sorry about that.