You sometimes hear cops check for “wants and warrants.” Constitutionally speaking, those are not the same.
Police had probable cause to arrest Ryan Milbeck for violating a restraining order after he secretly logged into his ex-wife’s email and social media. But Ryan lived 200 miles away, so the investigating detective contacted police in the jurisdiction where he lived and asked them to arrest him.
Police can rely on information from other officers. I’ve written before about such “collective information.” In that way, police can use the probable cause developed by another officer to make an arrest.
In this case, the police in his home jurisdiction said they’d require a warrant before they would arrest him. The investigating detective instead put a “want” in the system but told them she had a warrant. Police there seem to use the terms interchangeably. They went to his home, entered it, and took him into custody.
A want is just an official alert that a law enforcement officer has probable cause to arrest a specific person and asks any officer who encounters that person to take them into custody. That’s fine, and useful for leveraging the omnipresence of police to get arrestable people off the street.
But a want is not a warrant.
The Fourth Amendment protects us against unreasonable search and seizure. Entry by the government into a person’s home is presumptively unreasonable unless it is with a warrant issued by a judicial officer, or by consent or a warrant exception (like exigency).
In this case, because the police did not have an actual warrant (which involves the safeguard of review by a neutral and detached magistrate), Milbeck sued them for violating his constitutional rights under the Fourth Amendment.
He also sued the supervisor, who was aware of what they were doing, and the city, for not training its officers to understand the difference between a want and a warrant.
The trial court dismissed Milbeck’s suit and he appealed. Last week, in a case that highlights the importance of effective legal training for law enforcement, the Seventh Circuit vacated the court’s dismissal and remanded for further proceedings.
You can read the opinion here.
(And if my AI artwork looks familiar, you may be thinking of this recent post.)