External Audit Finds Sacramento PD Hasn’t Updated Its Search And Seizure Policy Since 2007

Privacy

from the never-mind-the-jurisprudence dept

The ignorance of cops is almost always their saving grace. If they can’t “reasonably” know the intricacies of the laws they uphold or the rights they’re supposed to respect, they’re too stupid to be punished for their wrongdoing. That’s how qualified immunity works. And that’s why it behooves police departments to keep officers in the dark about legal developments.

That plan tends to work out more often than not, so why upset the (bad) apple cart with periodic training and policy updates? That’s the story here, brought to us by KCRA.

The KCRA article opens with a shocker: the brief handcuffing of a crying 10-year-old girl that followed officers trying (and failing) to force their way into a home containing nothing more than the 10-year-old and her invalid grandmother. It’s upsetting, to be sure. And it was all captured on the officers’ body cameras.

But the problem runs far deeper than this incident. Sacramento’s independent police oversight entity — the Office of Public Safety Accountability (OPSA) — performed an audit [PDF] of the department and found plenty of problems that were apparently being ignored by the PD.

After a few pages of disagreement between the OPSA and the Sacramento PD about the disposition of misconduct allegations, the audit drops the bombshell:

SPD has a search and seizure manual. However, this manual is from 2007, and only generically describes search and seizure issues. It is unclear how SPD distinguishes a manual from a policy. This is significant because the United States Supreme Court, federal district court, and California state courts have issued several significant decisions pertaining to the Fourth Amendment since 2007.

Several. Significant. There’s a footnote attached to the last sentence. Here it is (I’ve added links to the relevant cases/Techdirt coverage):

The below cases were decided after 2007 and have significant Fourth Amendment implications:
Arizona v. Gant, 556 U.S. 332 (2009)
Arizona v. Johnson, 555 U.S. 323 (2009)
Glik v. Cunniffe, 655 F.3d 78 (1st Cir. 2011)
United States v. Jones 565 U.S. 400 (2012)
Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373 (2014)
Rodriguez v. United States, 575 U.S. 348 (2015)
Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. _, 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018)
People v Fews, 27 Cal.App.5th 553 (2018)
U.S. v. Landeros. 913 F.3d 862 (9th Cir. 2019)
Caniglia v. Strom, 593 U.S. , 141 S. Ct. 1596

We all have access to this information at any given time. Somehow, the Sacramento PD feels its officers don’t need to know about these cases, much less alter existing policies to conform with precedential decisions. OPSA suggests the PD remedy this as soon as possible by crafting a new policy and updating its manual to reflect the outcomes of these decisions and their effect on searches and seizures.

But it’s not just precedent from the last 15 years being ignored by the PD and its policies. The oversight office also found officers routinely violated the limitations erected by the Supreme Court’s 1968 Terry decision. Under that ruling, officers may only stop and frisk a person if they have reasonable suspicion a criminal act has or is going to take place, or for officer safety reasons if they have reasonable suspicion to believe someone they’ve stopped is carrying a weapon.

Here’s how that’s going in Sacramento:

From the review of body worn camera footage associated with the misconduct complaint cases, there were instances in which police officers assigned to the Gang Enforcement Team stated, “I pat everyone down” or demonstrated a pattern of conducting pat downs as an automatic police practice when officers encounter a citizen. In addition, the police reports associated with these searches rarely articulated what was dangerous about the citizen that necessitated a pat down. Since there is nothing in their reports to indicate that the officers do not perceive the citizen to be armed or dangerous, these automatic pat downs can be viewed as being per se unlawful according to the established law of Terry v. Ohio.

Officers also appear to routinely violate the First and Fourth Amendment by illegally seizing phones and/or preventing people from filming them:

In one case, police officers towed a citizen’s vehicle for his failure to consent to a cell phone search.

In [another] case, an elderly woman was outside recording several officers while they arrested her son. Her demeanor was calm, and she was on the sidewalk away from the officers who were on the street. Without speaking to her or obtaining her consent, one officer grabbed her while another officer twisted her arm until she lost control of her phone. The officers then seized the cell phone.

It’s all in there. Every violation possible. Probation searches of a vehicle not owned by a probationer and who was never observed using the vehicle. The detainment of every customer and employee in a local business for over an hour despite it being clear the customers and employees had not engaged in any criminal acts. Warrantless entries into people’s home. Abuse of warrant exceptions like welfare checks to engage in warrantless searches. And, yeah, there’s the cuffing of the ten-year-old that leads off the reporting on this audit.

But you don’t start by cuffing ten-year-olds. You end up there because smaller, less shocking acts of misconduct are ignored. You get to that point because the SPD doesn’t care enough about people or their rights to even bother updating its policy manual to reflect the current legal environment.

And there’s stuff like this, which shows the SPD is far more concerned about the tint of the drivers than the tint of their windows:

Lots of abuse. All of it very casual. And almost all of it ending with zero officers being punished, much less being hit with a sustained complaint.

A citizen was alleged to have been in possession of a handgun. However, the officer can be heard on the body worn camera footage saying, “It was somebody in white, I can’t tell you who it was though – probably this guy [points to a guy in a white shirt sitting near him]”. The officer then arrested this individual for being in possession of a handgun without knowing whether he had the firearm or not.

There’s plenty more in there, very little of which suggests Sacramento residents are getting the service they’re paying for. The SPD seems to operate outside of the law or at least in deliberate ignorance of it. And there’s no reason to believe this PD is somehow just worse than others. It’s just the latest to be caught in the act of pretending rights and rules are things only non-cops need to respect.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, audit, ospa, sacramento, sacramento pd, search and seizure