Thank you so much for all the heavily-cited relevant research!!!
I can’t recall if you personally weighed in on the question of whether or not you’d let them into your house, I will go search now.
Wow … I don’t know if I’ve ever been on the opposite side of an opinion from Dio before. It’s an uncertain feeling.
I love living a block and a half from my police station. I love that when I dialed 911 a few months ago when a fight broke out at a neighbor’s party, they showed up in no time flat. But they’re not coming in without a warrant; not for a month-old case.
I have broken no laws, and I have nothing to fear. Really nothing. I have gotten random drug tests at work. I have signed agreements to be subject to polygraph tests. You won’t find a cleaner, more law abiding person than me.
But they still don’t get in without a warrant. Either they have a good reason to search my home or they don’t. If there’s a good reason, it’ll be made clear to me and to the police by the existence of the search warrant.
If this is just some informal, “give the cops a break,” issue, well, I know I’m law-abiding, and when they ask me if a missing 18 year old woman is in my home, I’ll say that there isn’t, and since it’s just an informal thing, they should believe me. I mean, we’re all friends here, right?
You knowingly break a law, you deserve to get punished. If you feel a law is unjust, take legal means to remove the law. The law is the law, follow it or get punished. How many people upstream are saying that if you get searched and they find <insert illegality> they deserve to get punished?
The police have to prove that you’ve broken a law. Which is why you shouldn’t let them search you or your house unless they have a warrant to do so.
The converse is true, of course. If you’re such a stickler for the law then every time you go over the speed limit, or forget to use your signal, or cross the road where you’re not supposed to, or ride your bike on the side walk, etc, we expect you to turn yourself in to the closest police officer to get a ticket.
Bullshit.
I seem to recall you’ve made this claim before and been unable to back it up.
Yup, but I’m a U.S. ex-pat. Most of my schooling was in Michigan, so I’m more familiar with the Fourth Amendment than the Charter.
It’s illegal if the police think it is. They’re sort of Vampiric Nixons you have to let in your home.
:smack: Forgot to say THANKS for your research!
If refusing a warrantless search causes me to be put on a list of suspects to a crime that the police have no other reason to suspect me of, then requesting said search is unreasonable. The fourth amendment protects me against unreasonable searches.
If I am a suspect, then they will have no problem obtaining a proper warrant.
Geez Dio, the ethics is bound on the cops, not the schlub in the neighborhood. In the US, our rights are sacrosanct, and the cops are obliged to keep that in mind and act accordingly.
While the specifics of what the rights are may be different in Canada, I am sure the obligation is still on the police to justify a search, or risk having it thrown out as coercive.
I think the implication is, if you have anything fishy to worry about, the cops already know about it (or want you to think they do) and they will go get a warrant on that basis.
More BS.
Just get a warrant in the first place.
Say what? Let’s go over this again.
There’s a guy named Hadi Al Mutif who has spent 15 years on death row in Saudi Arabia for apostasy. He insulted the Prophet Muhammad. Pretty dumb of him, knowingly breaking the law like that.
I’ll leave it to you to tell him that he deserves his punishment. Me, I think the judge who sentenced him to death for an imaginary crime deserves to be punished …
In the US, there’s far too many imaginary crimes. I wouldn’t let the cops in my house on a bet. They are all too likely to find I’ve committed some imaginary offence.
Rights are not hypothetical when cops announce they are coming to your door to search. There is nothing LESS hypothetical possible. That is exactly the situation envisioned by the 4th and 5th Amendments (and whatever the Canadian equivalent is).
If the kid is not at your house, tell the cops to get a warrant, and if they can, they certainly will.
If the kid is at your house, do the same.
There is nothing lost by either side in doing so.
Heck, the whole thing is probably a fishing expedition so they can observe behavior, just when asking for a search. They don’t even care or the search. I wouldn’t even open the door for them, or if I did not realizing who was there, I’d keep it as short as humanly possible. “sorry can’t help you. bye. click.” You don’t even need to tell them to get a warrant, they know the drill already.
It is not voluntary, it is coercive. Even if you let them in and they find the girl ad 15 more boarded up in the walls (hello Ohio!), any attorney worth his salt is going to go hard to toss the results of the search.
This is very similar to invoking one’s Fifth Amendment rights (in the US). That is, a jury that hears a defendant plead the Fifth cannot use that as a sign of guilt. That is the whole point of these amendments.
My scenario:
<knock, knock>
“Yes - oh, cops. Is this that door-to-door thing?”
“Yes. Can we come in?”
“No. I disapprove of fishing expeditions on principle. Is there anything else? No?” <click>
So what do the 4th and 5th Amendments (Not anything new or radical really) mean to you?
If I need a cop in my house, I will let him in.
If he says he needs to be in my house, he needs a warrant.
See the difference?
Then you’d be wrong.
If the cops are so bereft of clues that they need to make an entire neighborhood decide to exercise their rights or not, then I would suggest they have better alternatives to narrowing down what happened to my kid than that. If not, then there are other ways to look for missing children than relying on cops, in fact better ways.
that is the point - it is meant to highlight those who would exercise their rights for further scrutiny, while those who would abrogate them - and I confess to being surprised how many dopers would - are rewarded by not being investigated further.