Would you prefer to read POLICE Magazine on a tablet?
Officers can enter when it reasonably appears someone inside may need emergency aid, regardless of the officers' actual, subjective motivations for going inside.
So far, the U.S. Supreme Court has left it to the states and the federal appellate circuits to make their own rulings on the issue of whether officers may make a stop to investigate a reported drunk driver, without having any independent observations to corroborate the anonymous tip. This has led to a split of authority on the issue.
Give Miranda warnings just before commencement of apparent custodial police interrogation-not sooner. Leave Hollywood tactics to the actors.
With reasonable suspicion that someone on the premises might endanger officers during the arrest or as they departed, officers could conduct a "protective sweep" of the entire premises, looking only into areas where a person could be concealed.
Devallis Rutledge discusses why law enforcement officers should be aware of what public school officials can and can't do when conducting searches on campus. You can also read the original article "Public School Searches" from the October 2009 issue.
Devallis Rutledge discusses why officers need to be careful when using social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. You can also read the original article "The Whole World is Watching" from the September 2009 issue.
Devallis Rutledge, author of POLICE Magazine's Point of Law articles, discusses what officers need to know about how the Supreme Court's Kansas v. Ventris and Montejo v. Louisiana rulings have affected the way officers must conduct interrogations lawfully under the Sixth Amendment. You can also read the original articles "Sixth Amendment Revisited" from the July 2009 issue and "Sixth Amendment Waivers" from August 2009.
Public school officials are entitled to search the student if there are reasonable grounds for suspecting the student of violating the law or any school rule. But once law enforcement officers become involved, higher justification standards will apply.
Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and thousands of other social networking Websites carry information that can be accessed by criminals and their attorneys, as well as by employers.
It will now be possible for law enforcement officers to attempt to obtain a waiver and an admissible statement from a defendant without running afoul of the Sixth Amendment.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys may now seek to maintain lawsuits against officers and their agencies for eliciting incriminating statements from a defendant in certain situations.
After Apr. 19, officers and agencies could incur liability for vehicle searches incident to arrest that do not fall within the Gant guidelines.
Officers who fall behind on core training and who stop getting regular updates on recent case law become a civil liability to themselves and their employers.
Although it's common to see the term "stop and frisk," it's possible that there might be justification for a stop, but not for a frisk.
What the exclusionary rule has actually meant in practice is that thousands (maybe millions) of criminals have been able to stop the prosecution from using critical evidence of their guilt to hold them accountable for their crimes.
Before traveling to another state where you intend to carry off duty, do a little research and inquire about local laws regulating firearms possession on private property.
Because warnings are only required prior to custodial interrogation, one way to minimize the adverse impact of Miranda on investigations is to try to conduct interrogations whenever possible in non-custodial settings.
Notwithstanding the explosion of youth criminality, the court has largely continued to treat juvenile offenders in a more lenient and paternalistic fashion than adults.
Much of what I learned in basic academy in the late 1960s is no longer good law. If I were still operating on the basis of 40-year-old understandings, I wouldn't be very effective.
"The first duties of the officers of the law are to prevent, not to punish crime. It is not their duty to incite to and create crime for the sole purpose of prosecuting and punishing it." — U.S. Supreme Court, Sorrells v. U.S.