Case law impacting various police operations

¶ … 1950s police operations in the United States were largely a local responsibility and there was very little developed case law in the area of criminal procedure. Officers in the streets were afforded wide discretion and most large city police departments were comprised mostly of patrol officers. Large detective branches within police departments had not yet developed and police departments were largely comprised of white males. All this changed in the late 1950s and early 1960s as civil and individual rights began to be addressed by the Courts and the laws governing criminal procedure began to be expanded and the Courts became more actively involved in the day-to-day operation of police agencies.

The 1960s marked a dramatic change in police powers and authority in the United States. Led by the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court under the guidance of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the power of the police agencies were curtailed substantially through the application of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. The Court, through a review of several key cases, began a process of reform that was intended to shield American citizens from what were interpreted as abuses of power by the police. In recent years, the trend in the Courts has been toward providing the police with increasingly more latitude in an effort to combat crime but many of the decisions made by the Warren Court remain as the standard for police conduct.

The case law that developed around the operation of police agencies covered a variety of different areas. One of these areas was the issue of privacy. Although privacy is not specifically cited in the Constitution as a recognized right the Courts have applied several provisions of the Constitution to provide citizens with this right. Decisions concerning the right of the police to search citizens and the need for police to obtain a valid warrant have had a major impact on the operation of the police. Beginning with the landmark case of Mapp v. Ohio (Mapp v. Ohio, 1961) in 1961, the Supreme Court applied the exclusionary law, which excludes the use of any evidence illegally obtained by the police in any subsequent prosecution, to the individual states the Courts have fashioned the law of privacy as it applies to criminal prosecutions. The exclusionary rule had applied to the federal government and its police agencies since 1914 when the U.S. Supreme Court adopted the rule in the case of Weeks v. United States (Weeks v. United States, 1914) but it was not until the decision in Mapp that the rule was applied to the states. Since Mapp, there have been a number of other significant cases that have addressed this important area of the law and thereby affected police operations. This is a highly dynamic area of the law and the case law interpreting police activities in regard to privacy issues is in a constant state of transformation.

Another significant area of the law that has affected police operation is the application of the Fifth Amendment. The Fifth Amendment, which in its simplest form provides criminal defendants with the right to remain silent, has been applied against police agencies since the nation's infancy but the right became more broadly applied in the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in Escobedo v. Illinois (Escobedo v. Illinois, 1964) and Miranda v. Arizona (Miranda v. Arizona, 1966). These two cases dramatically altered how police treated criminal defendants subsequent to their arrests and forced police agencies throughout the United States to develop new procedures. The reading of what have become to be popularly known as Miranda rights has become a routine part of every arrest. Like it has in many areas of criminal procedure, the U.S. Supreme Court has narrowed the application of Miranda and gradually chipped away at the rights originally granted by the Court that decided the case. Two of the more significant cases were decided in 1984 when the Court allowed an exception to Miranda in the case of New York v. Quarles (New York v. Quarles, 1984) so that police can use Miranda statements in situations involving public safety. Additionally, in a companion case the Supreme Court created the inevitable discovery exception which allowed the use of evidence that would have been inevitably discovered even without improper police questioning. The inevitable discovery rule arose from the Court's decision in Nix v. Williams (Nix v. Williams, 1984).

The involvement of the Court in the operation of the police has always been a hotly debated issue. On one side of the aisle are those that argue that the police should be provided wide latitude in combating crime in the United States while on the other side are those who argue that primary concern should be the protection of individual rights. The role of the Courts in this argument has been to seek a balance between the two extremes.