uh… They are stealing catalic converters now. No need to get in the car.
Just for kicks, roll the window down, get out of the car, close the door, hit the lock button on the key fob twice (does it honk or beep?). When the red light is blinking, reach in through the open window and open the door from the inside. Does that set off an alarm? The idea with that being that the car thinks the door opened without having the alarm disabled or getting a unlock signal from the key first.
Of course, it could just be a decoy as well.
If the alarm goes off on my car, it means accidentally hit the ‘panic’ button in my pocket.
No one is talking about privacy. There is a constitutional right against unlawful search. To get into your car, police need either a warrant or probably cause. Otherwise, they have no right to open your car, period.
They don’t need a reason to shine lights into your car from the outside, though.
What does that have to do with anything? This is about entering your car, not looking through the windows.
I don’t know whether it’s okay in a legal sense. Anybody know?
I don’t think they should have done it.
Depending on the car, it may be possible to tell whether it’s locked just by looking through the window and seeing if the little knob is up. And if it is, it can be locked without, strictly speaking, entering the car: just pull the door open and push the knob down.
If that’s what these cops were doing, they may not have thought of it as “getting into” anyone’s car. (Rightly or wrongly?)
Yeah, that’s been going on for years here. Seems to come and go in waves. Last big wave was maybe three years ago.
It’s considered a search in the jurisdictions I’m familiar with. Both Canada and the US have safeguards against unreasonable searches embedded in their constitutions. Other areas may vary.
I think it’s without question if they found anything that was not in plain sight via virtue of opening the car door, they couldn’t use it against you as evidence, and an attempt to would result in it being called an illegal search.
I’m not 100% sure if just opening the door of a car that doesn’t belong to you is a crime, though. What are the bounds of trespass law I guess would be the thing to look into? For example, it’s entirely legal for a door-to-door salesman to walk up to your house and ring the doorbell to try and solicit you. But if you put up a sign saying “No Trespassing” and “No Solicitation”, then in theory if they see it and knowingly do it anyway, it’s trespassing, because you’ve explicitly stated the default assumption doesn’t apply on your property.
GreysonCarlisle said he gave the cops a “tongue-lashing” for shining their flashlights into his car in a public place.
Got it. Might have made more sense if you quoted it. That was 130+ posts ago and 2 days earlier.
It’s the principle of establishing proper boundaries between government officers and individuals and their property. If we’re giving officers the permission to open our vehicles without our consent, we’re giving them the power to search our cars, including compartments that are not in plain view. Not that I’m concerned about what they’d find, but I am concerned about what they might “find.”
Even the existence of a sign may not be enough. It has to be established that someone was “warned” that they were not authorized to be on the property under any circumstances.
Messing around with an unlocked vehicle could be considered “tampering” or some other offense, depending on the state. It’s unclear how that might apply in the case of an officer doing “official duties,” which could (maybe?) include theft prevention.
Maybe not:
Constitutional protection for door-to-door salespeople
*he First Amendment to the United States Constitution states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The United States holds sacrosanct the First Amendment and the right to freedom of speech; a right that has been upheld by the Supreme Court in all cases relative to door-to-door sales, religious proselytizing, campaigning, and leafleting. In cases brought before it, the court has upheld the “right to sell” and the “right to tell”.
The arguments in these cases deal with the apparent conflict of two rights: the right to the exercise of freedom of speech and the right to privacy.
In each case, the court findings have concluded that there are less restrictive ways of protecting the homeowner’s privacy than restricting or curtailing a salesperson’s or canvassers right to freedom of speech. Therefore any law or ordinance seeking to outright prohibit soliciting will be deemed unconstitutional.
The specifics of these cases make interesting reading. You can find them here:
Remember, “illegal search” does not generally mean the cop is commiting a crime. It means any evidence seized will not be admissable.
If you left your door unlocked and a cop walked in and saw a huge pile of drugs, he certainly can seize them, and arrest you. Yes, the judge will throw that evidence out of court, and likely dismiss the charges. But you aint gettin those drugs back.
But illegal entry is. The cops aren’t supposed to be above the law.
No, that’s not the case at all. I have said specifically what they are worth, an exact dollar figure in fact. You need to stop putting words in other people’s mouths and pretending that they are at all relevant to the conversation at hand. Or don’t, whatever.
You are describing some pretty uncommon occurrence.
Look, all of this is because you assert that those who leave their doors unlocked have poor risk assessment, which is your uninformed opinion. It would be better to see that some people have different factors that go into their risk assessment, and that a “general rule” as you have admitted it to be, is not universal.
There are no roving bands of thieves running down the streets carrying off seats from a 2014 Ford Focus. You keep moving the goalposts to try to make your general rule an absolute rule that applies in all situations.
This is both assuming that I have no deductible on my insurance, and ignoring that my insurance rates may go up if I make such a claim.
It also means that I have to “waste” a police officer’s time to come out and take a report for me to file that claim.
Sure. I don’t have the vaccine for Yellow Fever as it’s not something that is very likely to affect me in Ohio, and its potential side effects outweigh its benefits. If we have a repeat of the 1878 epidemic, then I may reassess that decision.
Are you vaccinated against all and every disease we have a vaccine for, even if you have virtually no chance of encountering them? If not, then you have made the decision that it’s more dangerous to be vaccinated than to be unvaccinated (in your situation.)
The only 4th amendment exceptions I’m seeing WRT searching a car without a warrant or consent is if they see something in plain view and/or they have probably cause to believe there’s something illegal in the car.
My understanding is that if they have no reason to suspect there’s anything illegal in the car, but enter it and search it anyways, what’s protecting the officer is Qualified Immunity and even then, would they be protected from an illegal search if there was literally no reason to perform the search in the first place? Keeping in mind, we’re talking about an officer opening up a car door for no other reason than to see if it’s locked. They had no probable cause to beleive there was contraband in the car before opening the door.
I wasn’t aware of the specifics of that, good to know I guess.
I mean it’s literally backed by expert opinion. You’re essentially identical to anti-vaxxers who have all kinds of caveats about why you shouldn’t get vaccinated “I’m young”, “I’m in good shape”, “I have no comorbidities” etc etc. The vaccine is still less risky than the virus. Locking your car is less risky than not, end of story unless you can find any real data to back up your argument (which thus far you have not done, you’ve just intuited it based on a scenario where your only realistic concern is having your window broken.) The fact that there are individual scenarios where my general pronouncement was wrong don’t render it invalid. No one ever said “this statement is true in every situation ever”, it wasn’t a situational statement, it was a general statement. For example just because in some specific cases, people really are at higher risk from the vaccine than from covid19, does not mean the general statement “the vaccine is less risky than the virus, so getting vaccine is an example of good risk assessment and not getting vaccinated is an example of bad risk assessment.” There are clearly some individualized cases where it makes sense to not get the vaccine, for example a demonstrated allergy to the vaccine’s components, and a few other things would justify not getting it.
However I’d also say your personal knowledge that your window costs x $, and your belief no one is stealing old model Ford Focus cars is…silly. Older model cars are actually some of the more popular targets for car theft, particularly mass market ones like the Ford Focus–it would be stripped for parts, for which there is a very large secondary market.