Wireless Warrants?
A family friend is Commander of Operations for the Issaquah Police Department and he has graciously allowed me to attend some of his department’s nightly police briefings and go on ride-alongs with some of his officers. It’s always a fascinating experience, and I never know what to expect when I go. On a recent night out we encountered a hit-and-run vehicular homicide and spent most of the evening at the scene while Accident Investigation personnel and Detectives combed the scene for evidence. Results are still pending.
But the most fascinating aspect of these trips for me has been watching the officers interact with their on-board technology. When we are out riding around on patrol, for example, an officer is able to type in any vehicle license plate he sees and get a full readout on the registered owner and their outstanding warrants and criminal history. What used to require several layers of indirection through a dispatcher, to a remote database, and then back to the officer over the radio, now takes place in milliseconds at the officer’s fingertips and produces a written display in Windows that can be drilled down for as much detail as desired. Police radio activity updates from dispatch are replaced now with a secure, onscreen readout of all activity in the area, including neighboring jurisdictions. And just like the rest of us computer geeks, police are getting quite nimble with their keyboarding skills and using IM to communicate in real time with each other around town. I witnessed several IM conversations going at once while radio chatter was fairly limited. My officer partner mentioned that this onscreen activity readout and IM tool provided the force with secure new levels of confidential communications that were not vulnerable to outside surveillance. If you’ve been wondering why the police radio scanners are going quiet, this is probably why.
As you can see from the above photo, these vehicles are packing full-size laptop computers running Windows XP with wireless connectivity and roaming wireless database access. With portable fax machines that act as on-the-fly printers, full audio-video recording facilities on board with remote lapel microphones, and full-color video recording, these vehicles are little mobile recording studios that are changing the way evidence is gathered and preserved in the field.
One particularly creative criminal lawyer is taking unique advantage of this development. John Henry Hingson III, of Oregon City, Oregon has challenged the seizure of breath test results from persons arrested for drunk driving, claiming that a long-standing exception to the warrant requirement is no longer applicable to police riding around with this kind of mobile utility. Under traditional law, searches require a warrant issued by a magistrate upon a showing under oath of probable cause. Warrantless searches are regarded as inherently unreasonable, but exceptions have always been made in certain situations where probable cause exists to search, and “exigent circumstances” are present that prohibit the police from the opportunity to secure a warrant. The mobile, roaming nature of a vehicle, for example, creates an exigency that gives rise to a vehicle exception when there is otherwise probable cause to search. Similarly, the deterioration of blood alcohol evidence in the field has traditionally created just such an exigency in DUI cases and justified the warrantless seizure of a person’s breath or blood sample for testing. It wasn’t deemed reasonable to require a police officer to leave the scene, go get a judge, secure a warrant, and then return to serve it upon the defendant. By that time, the argument goes, the evidence will have deteriorated.
Hingson argues, however, that there’s no longer a valid basis for claiming such an exigency, since the communications capabilities of modern police cars allow a police officer in the field to phone in to a judge a request for a “telephonic” search warrant and have a faxed printout available to serve on the defendant within minutes. It’s a fascinating argument and one that opens up new lines of thought challenging traditional notions of “exigency” in a world that is shrinking rapidly as a result of high-tech communications capabilities.
Hingson tells me that he’s still waiting for a favorable ruling on the motion, but he’s a fly fisherman with infinite patience and not easily discouraged. I’ll report here on his results soon as I hear them.
RP