Whoops! Sorry I shot your dog

Via Radley Balko's The Agitator comes word of a heavily armed Stockton, California, "code enforcement" team that arrived at the wrong address in the course of responding to a complaint about drug use--and ended up shooting the family dog and injuring a mother and her five-year-old daughter.

Yes, you heard that right; a code enforcement team which, according to the article, "addresses unsafe living conditions and includes armed deputies for the safety of environmental health workers... A team includes a sergeant, two deputies, two environmental health workers and two code enforcement officers, and often a California Highway Patrol officer." What are code inspectors doing tagging along on a drug raid? Conversely, what are cops doing tagging along for a home inspection?

Balko suggests that such teams have been assembled as an end-run around the Fourth Amendment. The inspectors can gain access to homes that would require warrants for police officers alone. While the article isn't clear on whether the team had a warrant, I think he's probably right; other jurisdictions--notably, Belleville, Illinois--have pulled similar stunts explicitly to get around the search-and-seizure protections that usually shield people from unwarranted intrusions into their homes.

But such stunts are almost certainly unconstitutional. In 1967, in the case of Camara v. Municipal Court of San Francisco, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled:

In summary, we hold that administrative searches of the kind at issue here are significant intrusions upon the interests protected by the Fourth Amendment, that such searches when authorized and conducted without a warrant procedure lack the traditional safeguards which the Fourth Amendment guarantees to the individual, and that the reasons put forth in Frank v. Maryland and in other cases for upholding these warrantless searches are insufficient to justify so substantial a weakening of the Fourth Amendment's protections.

The Supreme Court allowed an exception for "emergency situations," which Stockton may have invoked as a creative interpretation of the drug complaint. Or Stockton may simply have ignored the standard set by the Supreme Court as Belleville has done. The idea that
home inspectors have super-constitutional powers seems to be stuck in the minds of certain government officials, never to be dislodged by mere legal precedent. That's dangerous enough, but the full extent of politicians' contempt for constitutional protections becomes clear when they attempt to piggyback police officers on the special powers they imagine to be possessed by code enforcers.

Unfortunately, the importance of constitutional protections is emphasized most strongly by incidents like the one in Stockton. Any encounter between citizens and government officials is fraught with legal risk for the citizens. Who can keep track of all the laws on the books and be sure that they've run afoul of none? But add armed police officers to the mix and the potential for violence becomes very real. That's especially true as police have become increasingly aggressive in their tactics.

A warrant requirement at least places some restraints on the encounter. At the very least, there must be suspicion of criminal activity and probable cause to persuade a judge (although too many judges these days are nothing but rubber stamps). Searches done by the book, with warrants, are sufficiently subject to abuse and mistake that loosening restraints on the state clearly opens the door for horrific results.

Like arriving at the wrong address, shooting a harmless dog and wounding a mother and her daughter with bullet fragments.