What can you do when the police dig through your garbage without your permission?
What can you do if the police dig through your garbage without your permission? You get even by digging through their garbage. Willamette Weekly published this article back in 2002. Their idea was both simple and effective. Whose garbage did they investigate?:
We chose District Attorney Mike Schrunk because his office is the most vocal defender of the proposition that your garbage is up for grabs. We chose Police Chief Mark Kroeker because he runs the bureau. And we chose Mayor Vera Katz because, as police commissioner, she gives the chief his marching orders.
The first two of these three had publicly proclaimed that it was OK for the police to invade a woman’s privacy by digging through her garbage. This is a well-written piece demonstrating that revenge is, indeed, a dish best served cold.
The legal problem with rifling someone’s garbage is that once the garbage becomes “public,” anyone could easily add things to that garbage. A dishonest cop, for example, knowing that the police plan to jack someone’s trash, could very easily add things (e.g., drug evidence) to that person’s trash. Thus, we must be wary of accepting the validity of what might literally be ‘trashy’ evidence.
Police don’t plant evidence, do they? They’d never plant a gun on an unarmed person they shot, for instance. Would they?
My nephew once needed a bondsman. During the interview, as he instructed us on his services and the repurcussions of “jumping bail” he confessed that he always carried two guns while searching for his client; one with the serial number ground off. He left it to us to figure out why. I got the impression from the layout of his office that he was a former policeman. Perhaps his statements were just a way to limit complications.