Warrants are such a pesky formality for police officers. When they want to search a house and the owner isn’t stupid enough to just let them walk right in the police have to make a phone call to a judge, wait a few minutes for him to issue a warrant, and finally search the home. Some cunning officers in North Carolina have apparently come up with a way to bypass that inconvenient formality:
A North Carolina police chief has officially barred officers from making up phony 911 calls in order to gain access to private residences without a search warrant.
Several officers with the Durham Police Department lied about 911 hang-up calls to convince residents to consent to searches of their homes, an officer said under oath in late May, a local ABC affiliate reported.
The allegations prompted Police Chief Jose Lopez to send out an internal memo barring the practice.
“It has recently been brought to my attention that some officers have informed citizens that there has been a 911 hang-up call from their residence in order to obtain consent to enter for the actual purpose of looking for wanted persons on outstanding warrants,” he said in the memo, Raw Story reported. “Effective immediately no officer will inform a citizen that there has been any call to the emergency communications center, including a hang-up call, when there in fact has been no such call.”
Statists often tell me that my anarchist views are crazy because we need government to protect our rights. I find it peculiar to charge the biggest violator of rights with the task of protecting rights and this story demonstrates why. The state has written up its own set of rules, which it claims protects our rights, and then bypasses those same rules, meaning it must be violating our rights.