A thorough search of a room can take quite some time. When were providing Technical Surveillance Counter Measures sweeps (searching for bugs and cameras), we allowed two hours with two people to search (“sweep”) a single executive office. It sometimes took longer. The part where electronic equipment was used was probably less than 15 minutes for a single person. (This is what you see on TV and in movies…and it is not very effective.) We worked very quickly because sweeps are most often done when the office and building are unoccupied.
(Not meant to be a hijack, but we’re talking about “searches” here. In a domestic case, we did indeed often search an entire house.)
I had an aunt who was, well, a hoarder. Not to the level of keeping empty containers and outright trash, but she had a thing about ‘documents.’ She simply never got rid of any printed matter that entered her life. She kept every newspaper, magazine, bill, even junk mail. Every flyer handed to her on the street, the order of service thingies from each Sunday’s church., programs from performances, all the paperwork and manuals for everything she bought. On and on and on.
She felt she couldn’t dispose of this stuff until she’d read it completely (yes, even the ads from chimney sweep companies when she didn’t HAVE any chimneys) but she really didn’t enjoy reading so she’d set it all down in massive heaps on the kitchen counter and dining room tables and end tables and every other flat surfaces.
But she didn’t want people to see how messy that was, so any time she had company coming she’d get a bunch of boxes from the grocery store and simply pile the undifferentiated masses into the boxes, label each one (I’m not kidding) something like “Assorted papers - 10/03/74 - Sort now!” and then stack the boxes up ‘out of the way.’
By the end she had to move to a nursing home, the garage and basement were completely filled, floor to ceiling, and many other rooms had gradually shrunk as walls of stacked boxes encircled the walls.
I think if anyone had ever had to search her house for secret documents, they would have ended up torching the house instead.
(We hired professionals to simply transfer the boxes to dumpsters. If she’d actually hidden anything valuable among them… well, too bad. Life is short.)
I’ve taken part in hundreds of search warrant executions. How long you search really depends on what you’re looking for and how important the case is. Back when weed was illegal you might spend a couple of hours looking around a large house. We normally didn’t bother with weed cases unless there were at least tens of pounds involved. Its kind of hard to hide those quantities. In almost every drug case, “papers, records and proceeds” were included in the warrant. These things can be almost anywhere so the search would be thorough. Especially, if an upper level drug dealer (assets) was the target. The search of a street level dealer’s dwelling might take less time. They usually didn’t take great pains to hide their stash and we didn’t want to spend time looking for what we knew would probably be relatively small amounts. On homicide case, a detailed forensic search of a house can take many hours or even days.
I recognize that from a Law and Order episode. I didn’t know it was based on a real case.
This was my question. Let’s say they are looking for a hand gun. Are they going to radar the walls? Pull the drywall? Pull up the carpet? Remove the built-in appliances? Open up the dryer cabinet? Go up in the attic and sift the insulation? The basement bricks? Dig up the entire back yard?
As a lifetime viewer of procedurals, I have thought about places to hide stuff, and there are many many places that a visual search would never find. Tearing the housed literally to shreds seems excessive, crossing into harassment.
Karla Homolka still got only 10 years, she’s been out for quite a while, IIRC married with children now. The prosecutors were so sensitive, there was a hue and cry over them making it illegal to even mention the plea deal before the trial (at which some US websites noted, “we don’t care about Canadian gag orders”). Even after it was revealed she’d neglected to mention a fourth drugged rape victim, a condition of her plea deal, they stuck to the deal. They even tried to get revenge and prosecute Bernardo’s lawyer for obstruction for not immediately turning over the tapes.
I would suggest there’s no reason to tear out walls etc. unless there’s evidence to suggest they’d been opened. (Like the L&O episode where they find a patch of fresh concrete in the basement floor). It’s just the Bernardo case was spectacularly notorious, so the police went to extra lengths - plus Karla had told them there were tapes probably somewhere in the house, so they really wanted to find them.
md-2000 has it right. We wouldn’t start disassembling things unless we saw evidence that someone else had done so first. Screws screwed in cross-threaded, screws that were obviously loose in their holes from repeated use, loose trim work or floor boards etc. One time we found the coke (several ounces) inside an oven door. I don’t remember why we looked there - maybe an informant told us to. On another case I located a big stash of guns in a secret compartment in a bedroom closet. That was definitely informant info. “Somewhere in his closet” or similar.
Unless its a really elaborate hide, its just as difficult for the “hider” to get easy access as it is for the cops. People are lazy and tend to want easy access to their stuff. Things like weapons or large amounts of cash that don’t have to be accessed on a regular basis can be hidden in walls etc. but that was pretty rare, in my experience.
One more informant tip - we searched the residence of a kilo weight dealer and got plenty of drugs, records and some cash. While he was sitting in jail he told someone that we missed his get-away money hidden behind a medicine cabinet. They, in turn, told me. We got another warrant and sure enough, $12,000 in cash was found after we unscrewed the cabinet from the wall. I wrote him a note saying “Sorry! Beat you to it!”, put it back where the cash was and neatly screwed the cabinet back in.
Not very professional, I know, but this guy was a jerk and kept going on about how we’d never see him again once he got out on bail. He would probably have known about our find because of the inventory we left but maybe not, if he went right to the cabinet.