My experience in 17 years of local law enforcement was that we were very careful with search and arrest warrants. Careful to the point of letting some people escape and allowing some evidence to be destroyed. At the end of the day, my personal philosophy (and one that I continually tried to impart to my patrolmen) was that you have three resposibilities as a cop:
1.
To yourself. Stay fit, eat right, train continuously, and never place yourself in a position where your integrity can be questioned. If you cannot take care of yourself, then you cannot fulfill your other two responsibilities.
2.
To other cops. If you cannot be trusted to make reasoned, fair decisions both in terms of enforcement as well as the use of force, then you are a liability as well as a danger to your partners.
3.
To the public. If you can satisfy the first two responsibilities, THEN you can fulfill your mandate to serve and protect.
If a cop is dirty, gives false testimony, plays outside the rules, then he has failed to fulfill
all three of the above responsibilities. He has placed himself in danger of losing every possession he has. He has endangered his fellow cops, and he has failed to serve the public.
Having been sued in my office a couple times, I can tell you that if you make a willful or egregious violation in the search and seizure venue, there will be an attorney putting liens on your house, your car, and the few possessions you can actually afford on a cop salary. 99.9% of the guys out there on the job are doing things correctly. Cops are people too, and the vast majority play by the rules.
Place yourself in a cops shoes, and then ask yourself, what would make falsifying testimony for a warrant worth the risks to my personal well being? NO criminal is worth that. There are some folks who seem to believe that most cops somehow sit around figuring how to fvck people over. In truth, most cops spend their time just trying to figure out how to reconcile their duties and obligations to their employer while simultaneously maintaining their duties to their own families and loved ones. That in itself is a full time job, leaving little room for the hanky panky that some of you seem to think is so rampant.
I agree with the Castle Doctrine. I think that it is one of the many protections we have in place against organized government oppression. That being said, the typical individual police officer is never going to allow himself to be used as a tool to that end. Also, check out the following organization:
http://oathkeepers.org/oath/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. You'll find this mindset to be much more prevalent among police officers than the mindset that would lead to unlawful searches and seizures. I am still a member although no longer in law enforcement. The organization has a few goofy tenets, but the underlying belief system is legitimate.
). An officer can abuse this currently and they do, but the exingent circumstances has to be proven after the fact to the judge. All evidence and charges resulting from the forced entry are subject to being thrown out of court if they don't pass the smell test. That tends to piss off DA's and result in "early" retirement for some officers I imagine...
