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Redefining What's “Reasonable”: the Protections for Policing

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Redefining What's “Reasonable”: the Protections for Policing \\jciprod01\productn\G\GWN\84-2\GWN201.txt unknown Seq: 1 18-MAR-16 13:42 Redefining What’s “Reasonable”: The Protections for Policing Barry Friedman and Cynthia Benin Stein* ABSTRACT How should the Constitution govern police surveillance and investiga- tions? Once, the formal rules were clear, even if not faithfully observed: searches and seizures required probable cause and a warrant. Today, how- ever, the Supreme Court has said that many forms of police activity need only be “reasonable.” But what is required to ensure that policing is “reasonable”? This question has become all the more pressing and perplexing as policing has shifted from a reactive, investigative approach that centers on suspicion that a particular person has committed a particular crime to a more programmatic, deterrent approach that relies on searching and seizing people without any suspicion of wrongdoing. In numerous contexts today—among them the use of drones, stop and frisk, bulk data collection, DNA testing, and a myriad of other controversial activities—the government justifies warrantless and often suspicionless surveillance by applying a mushy reasonableness balancing test. Courts, commentators, politicians and police all are at a loss to know precisely what is, or should be, required. This Article argues that matters can be simplified greatly by focusing not on the policing technique at issue, but on the protections that ensure against the use of arbitrary police discretion. Whatever else the Fourth Amendment safeguards, there is widespread agreement that it is a protection against arbi- trary and unjustified government intrusion. Policing has a binary nature to it. Policing agencies engage in two types of searches: (1) They investigate, based on individualized suspicion (“cause”) to believe a person has committed a crime; and (2) they engage in suspicionless searches that seek, in a program- matic or deterrent way, to curb a social problem and prevent criminal con- duct. The categories themselves are not, nor are they meant to be, airtight. Rather, what is clear are the protections necessary to safeguard liberty in each of the two circumstances. In every instance, government must be prepared to answer the question of why it has singled out a particular individual or group for attention. In the context of investigative, suspicion-based searches, the re- * Barry Friedman is the Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. Cynthia Benin Stein is an associate at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and former law clerk for the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. For helpful comments and suggestions, we thank Sherry Colb, Risa Goluboff, William Hubbard, Aziz Huq, Orin Kerr, Daryl Levinson, Tracy Maclin, Sandy Mayson, Eve Primus, Dapha Renan, Adam Samaha, Christopher Slobogin, and the participants of the University of Chicago Law School Constitutional Law Workshop and the NYU School of Law Faculty Workshop. We thank our research assistants Max Gektin, Bradley Markano, Jacob Rae, and Emma Spiro for excellent help, with a special debt of gratitude to Anna Estevao. We acknowledge the generous support of the Filomen D’Agostino and Max E. Greenberg Research Fund at NYU Law School. March 2016 Vol. 84 No. 2 281 \\jciprod01\productn\G\GWN\84-2\GWN201.txt unknown Seq: 2 18-MAR-16 13:42 282 THE GEORGE WASHINGTON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 84:281 quirement of probable cause performs this function. It explains why the po- lice are searching one person, not another. But cause makes no sense with regard to programmatic or deterrent searches—such as airport security or so- briety roadblocks—where there is no “suspect,” and thus no suspicion. Here, instead, the safeguard is generality—either we are all searched, or who gets searched is decided in a truly random or otherwise indiscriminate way. And if the government wants to search a subset of the population, standard Equal Protection Clause analysis, which typically is ignored in the area of policing, provides the proper rubric for asking whether singling out one group, but not another, is justified. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................. 283 R I. DOCTRINE LOST ........................................ 289 R A. (De)Evolution of the Doctrine ...................... 290 R 1. The Breach ..................................... 290 R 2. The Fallout ..................................... 292 R 3. The Incoherent “Special Needs” Doctrine ...... 293 R 4. Turning “Reasonableness” into a Balancing Test ............................................. 296 R B. The Wages of Confusion ............................ 299 R 1. Lowered Cause = More Intrusions + Lower Efficacy ......................................... 299 R 2. Searches Without Cause = More Dragnets ..... 303 R C. Scholars Have No Solution ......................... 305 R 1. The First Wave ................................. 305 R 2. The Second Wave............................... 307 R a. Ducking the Question ....................... 307 R b. Fixing the Categories ........................ 308 R II. TWO TYPES OF PROTECTIONS FOR TWO TYPES OF SEARCHES .............................................. 310 R A. A Puzzling Problem ................................ 310 R B. Two Old Chestnuts ................................. 312 R 1. Camara’s Dilemma ............................. 312 R 2. Prouse: Misery Loves Company ................ 313 R C. Back to First Principles ............................. 315 R D. Two Types of Searches.............................. 317 R 1. Avoiding Arbitrariness I: Warrants and Probable Cause ................................. 320 R 2. Avoiding Arbitrariness II: Generality (or Randomness) ................................... 320 R 3. A Note on “Hit Rates” ......................... 323 R E. The Necessity of Alternate Safeguards ............... 324 R \\jciprod01\productn\G\GWN\84-2\GWN201.txt unknown Seq: 3 18-MAR-16 13:42 2016] REDEFINING WHAT’S “REASONABLE” 283 F. Return to the Doctrine .............................. 326 R III. HARD(ER) CASES ....................................... 327 R A. Subpopulation Searches (and the Equal Protection Clause) ............................................. 327 R 1. Race and Other Suspect Classifications ......... 329 R a. Race in Suspect Descriptions ................ 329 R b. Race as Part of a Profile .................... 333 R c. Suspicionless Racial Searches ............... 335 R 2. Non-Suspect Classifications ..................... 336 R a. Stricter Scrutiny ............................. 337 R b. What Stricter Scrutiny Should Look Like ... 340 R B. Searching on Less than Probable Cause ............. 343 R 1. Terry Unbound ................................. 343 R 2. Terry Cabined .................................. 345 R C. Kids, Convicts, and Workers ........................ 349 R 1. Lowering Cause Thresholds; Eliminating Warrants ........................................ 350 R 2. Programmatic Searches ......................... 352 R CONCLUSION ................................................... 353 R INTRODUCTION When it comes to regulating policing—from the beat cop to the National Security Agency—the Supreme Court is flailing.1 Not that anyone else is doing much better. Courts and commentators, mayors and presidents, civil libertarians, police chiefs, and spymasters alike cannot come to any kind of consensus as to how the enigmatic text of the Fourth Amendment is supposed to apply to new enforcement challenges, policing strategies, and technologies. Controversy over these issues undoubtedly reflects variant political agendas, but the tur- moil runs deeper. People are simply at a loss to understand how the Constitution governs present-day policing. It wasn’t always this way. The formal rules were once clear, even if not always faithfully observed.2 Searches and seizures were said to 1 For the purposes of this Article, “policing” refers to the exercise of force or surveillance in order to deter crime or apprehend violators. Some understand intelligence gathering as a separate endeavor altogether, but the distinction is problematic. First, as this Article’s discussion of the “primary purpose” doctrine makes clear, it is not always possible to distinguish between “ordinary law enforcement” and other societal needs. Second, it is increasingly clear that there is a spillover between intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies. See ATT’Y GEN., THE ATTORNEY GENERAL’S GUIDELINES FOR DOMESTIC FBI OPERATIONS (2008), http://www.justice .gov/sites/default/files/ag/legacy/2008/10/03/guidelines.pdf. 2 See infra Part I, regarding the claims in this paragraph. \\jciprod01\productn\G\GWN\84-2\GWN201.txt unknown Seq: 4 18-MAR-16 13:42 284 THE GEORGE WASHINGTON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 84:281 require probable cause and a warrant. If a police officer wanted to stop or search someone, he had to have a good reason. And prefera- bly, that officer would have obtained prior approval from a judicial officer. But then lesser standards such as “reasonable” and “articul- able” suspicion crept into the law, sometimes substituting for probable cause. Today, the Supreme Court frequently states that suspicion is not an “irreducible requirement,”3 meaning that the government can search and seize with nary a reason to suspect wrongdoing. Warrants have been dispensed with pretty much altogether.4 Instead, we are told, searches need only be “reasonable.” But what makes them so? The problem finds its root in the beguiling phrasing of the Fourth Amendment, which seems to require warrants
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