Cops Caught Snooping in Backyard Looking for AirPods | Is That Legal?

It’s August 19, 2022. Imagine a woman is at home, in a quiet neighborhood in Bay County, Florida. Unbeknownst to her, someone’s air pods went missing. For some reason – and I’ve been seeing a lot of this lately – the cops believe they could be located in her home. That’s probably because a stranger shows up first, claiming his missing air pods were pinging from inside the house. The woman doesn’t answer the door, because he’s a stranger. A little while later, the cops show up with no warrant, and do what creepy cops do, which is search without a warrant. They go into the woman’s backyard. One stands outside the bedroom window of her 15 year old son, like some sort of law enforcement pepping tom. 

There was apparently no warrant here. But the cops didn’t go inside the home. Does that matter? For the too-long-won’t-watch types, I’ll save you some time and let you get back to your funny animal videos. Cops need a warrant, even in your backyard, with only a couple limited exceptions – none of which appear applicable here. You’re free to go. For the rest of you, let me explain.

According to the 1984 Supreme Court opinion in Oliver v. United States, the heightened Fourth Amendment protections of the home extend beyond just the interior of the home itself into what’s called the “curtilage” of the home, which is the land immediately surrounding and associated with the home. Why? Because according to the Supreme Court, the curtilage is considered part of the home itself for Fourth Amendment purposes. 

In the 2013 Supreme Court opinion of Florida v. Jardines, the Court held that a search undoubtedly occurs when the government, without a warrant, obtains information by physically intruding within the curtilage of a house, which in that actual case involved a home’s front porch. The Court cautioned that a search occurs unless a homeowner has explicitly or implicitly sanctioned the government’s physical intrusion into the constitutionally protected area, i.e., the yard and/or porch of the home.

Under the “knock and talk” exception to the warrant requirement, a police officer not armed with a warrant may approach a home and knock, precisely because that is “no more than any private citizen might do.”

This means there is an “implicit license . . . to approach the home by the front path, knock promptly, wait briefly to be received, and then (absent invitation to linger longer) leave.” An officer may also bypass the front door (or another entry point usually used by visitors) when circumstances reasonably indicate that the officer might find the homeowner elsewhere on the property. “Critically, however, the right to knock and talk does not entail a right to conduct a general investigation of the home’s curtilage.”

The 11th Circuit, which applies to Florida specifically, warned police officers in the case of U.S. v. Maxi in 2018 that their right to go up to a citizen’s front door on a knock and talk, does not include inviting armed me into the homeowner’s yard to “launch a raid” or “conduct a search.”

The only possible justification for this behavior would be circumstances of “hot pursuit.”  Under the hot pursuit doctrine, police officers may enter premises without a warrant when they are in hot pursuit of a fleeing suspect. A “hot pursuit means some sort of chase. The Supreme Court has indicated that a claim of hot pursuit is “unconvincing” where there was “no immediate and continuous pursuit of the petitioner from the scene of a crime. See United States v. Fuller (11th Cir. 2014).

That clearly does not appear to be the case here. Even assuming airpods actually went missing, and even assuming someone claims that they pinged to this location; and even assuming they did in fact ping to this location, that doesn’t change the legal analysis. When it comes to a home, which includes the curtilage around the home, a warrant is required. Or consent. Or exigent circumstances, which in the case would have to be a subcategory of exigent circumstances – hot pursuit. That in turn requires probable cause that some crime was committed and that an individual they pursued into the house may have committed that crime. 

I see no indication of any pursuit or chase whatsoever – certainly not one that is also immediate and continuous, all the way from some crime scene. All they have as far as justification goes is their right to knock and talk. Cops have been abusing knock and talks for years. On a knock and talk, they are merely authorized to act as a little girl selling girl scout cookies would do. As I explained in a previous video about this, police have an implied license, just like anyone, to come knock on your door and talk to you. 

My prior video on what you need to know about “knock and talks” and related law:

But you can revoke that implied license by asking them to leave, or even putting up no trespassing signs, or “no cops allowed signs.” They won’t inform you that you don’t have to talk to them and can ask them to leave. But you can. But they won’t tell you – because they want you to think that you have no choice but to interact with them and answer their questions. Know your rights. Tell them to leave, and to go pound sand, if that’s what you want. 

Something I learned in my years of criminal defense practice. Generally speaking, the cops want to talk with you because they have no evidence against you. They are required by law to have evidence in order to get a search warrant, or an arrest warrant. They need you to provide that for them. Any time you’re tempted to provide this for them, think of a taxidermy fish on the wall, mounted with a plaque that reads, “if I had only kept my mouth shut.”

Fourth Circuit Holds Mass Aerial Surveillance is Unconstitutional

This past Thursday, on June 24, the Fourth Circuit quietly issued an en banc opinion in “Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department, which challenged the Baltimore Police Department’s Aerial Investigation Research (AIR) pilot program on Fourth Amendment grounds. In an opinion written by Chief Judge Roger Gregory, the Court held that the AIR mass aerial surveillance program was an unconstitutional search and seizure (at least at the point the data was accessed).

The AIR program “tracks every movement” of every person outside of a structure in the City of Baltimore, retaining 45 days worth of data which is a “detailed, encyclopedic” record of where everyone came and went within the city during daylight hours. Law enforcement can “travel back in time” to observe a target’s movements, forwards and backwards. The Court likened the data to “attaching an ankle monitor to every person in the city,” and noted that, “whoever the suspect turns out to be, they have effectively been tailed for the prior six weeks.”

The Court held that “because the AIR program opens “an intimate window” into a person’s associations and activities, it violates the reasonable expectation of privacy individuals have in the whole of their movements.” Whereas traditional aerial or static camera surveillance have been upheld as reasonable by the courts, those cases “all involve some discrete operation surveilling individual targets.”

The AIR program records the movements of a city. With analysis, it can reveal where individuals come and go over an extended period. Because the AIR program enables police to deduce from the whole of individuals’ movements, we hold that accessing its data is a search, and its warrantless operation violates the Fourth Amendment.

Opinion at p. 28

The AIR program is like a 21st century general search, enabling the police to collect all movements, both innocent and suspected, without any burden to “articulate an adequate reason to search for specific items related to specific crimes.

Opinion at p. 32

Since this holding came from the Fourth Circuit sitting en banc, the only where to go from here is to the U.S. Supreme Court.