Search Warrants and Affidavits

Search Warrants are another individual tool that each investigator should have in their box.  A few episodes have released recently covering individual items that every investigator should have:  CI Management, SWs, Stationary and Mobile Surveillance, UOF Knowledge, Use of Deadly Force Understanding, Trash Pulls (barf).

This is one of the more important ones.  Develop your understanding of what a SW is, what is expected in the different parts of the SW packet, and how to develop what you need to do what you want to do:  GET IN YOUR TARGET'S HOME!  CAR!  PHONE!  IG!  FB!

Develop an understanding of the law and consult with your prosecutor prior to get your SW signed by a judge!  If they don't like your warrant or see some error that the judge misses, it's all for nada.

Learn from my mistakes and occasional successes!

-LEO

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Good morning. That Leo guy here. And I think you know what I'll be talking about today. Search warrants. I'm going to go into the development of probable cause, what probable cause is, and the writing of search warrants, not the operational planning and execution of search warrants. Search warrants are just such a big topic. It's it's really hard to cover it in a reasonable amount of time. And I don't want to talk to you for 20 hours. So I'm going to do the best I can to be as concise as I can. But it is something, it's an excellent tool for what? Collecting facts. That's right. It's a way to get facts, get evidence. It is underused in a lot of units. In the previous episodes about homicide investigation with Robin Al, the interview, they used them a lot, and it led to high closure rates. You see a lot of burglary, robbery, auto theft units that are not using them as much as they could. You see a lot of patrol officers that would love to learn how to do search warrants and just simply don't know how. So what this episode will do, it will give you a bare bones basis for what they are, what the different components are, and how you can learn more. Okay. It's this isn't going to give you enough to go out and bang out a search warrant, but it's going to give you a heavy nudge in the right direction. And if you're already doing search warrants, awesome. And hopefully you take something away from this. And as always, if you have something to add, something crucial that I missed, which will happen, because like I said, it's such a large topic, it would be hard to cover it in a reasonable amount of time and not miss something. So feel free to drop it on that Leo guy's Facebook or hit the send me a message button and tell me my errors. I won't be hurt. I've already done an episode on consent to search, which is consent being an exception to the Fourth Amendment. So to talk about search warrants, I have to do a quick definition once again of what the Fourth Amendment is and what a search warrant is and how it's an exception to it. The Fourth Amendment is simple. It protects citizens from unreasonable search and seizure by the government. The government, including police officers, state patrol, federal agents, sheriff deputies. It protects citizens from you just searching them willy-nilly, effectively being a police state where the police can come in and do whatever they want with no rules. Fourth Amendment is a rule. There are exceptions to the rule, exigency, consent, search warrants, which is what we're going to talk about today. Okay. If you want to infringe upon someone's civil rights, you know, upon their Fourth Amendment right, you can if you have an exception. If you don't have a valid exception, you have just violated their civil rights. Meaning, if I go kick in somebody's door without a warrant, without an exception, without a warrant, without a consent, without any of these, you know, court accepted exceptions, I have violated their civil rights. And I can be sued in federal court. It's called a 1983 lawsuit. And if I go kick in random doors as a cop, I can expect to get hit with one of those for a violation of civil rights. They don't want to sue, they can go to internal affairs and get you fired or suspended or whatever your department decides to do. But we don't want to do civil rights violations. Let's uh let's avoid that. A valid search warrant avoids that. It allows you to infringe upon people's Fourth Amendment. It's okay. The standard to get a search warrant is that the prob there's probable cause that you are seeking an item or some data if it's electronic, and that there's a crime involved, and that that item is tied directly to that crime, and that it's at a location or in a device. So you have to talk about what you're looking for, what the crime is, where it's going to be, and why you believe it's going to be there, which is the probable cause part. So let's go ahead and break that stuff down further, because if you miss any of that, which people commonly do, it invalidates your search warrant. So if you can prove just way beyond probable cause, let's say you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt, which is not the legal standard for a search warrant. The legal standard to get a search warrant is to search somebody's home, person, phone, whatever, car, anything is probable cause. Well, let's say you have way more than that. You can prove completely that a crime was committed and that there is an item you're looking for. You're looking for a gun. You can prove you know everything about that gun. It's a Glock 19 serial number, ABC123, blah, blah, blah. You know everything about it. It's got a silver slide. It's totally unique. You can talk all about this gun and the murder it was used in, but you don't have a valid nexus tying it to that house. It's an invalid search warrant. So any two of those is just not good enough. If you can prove completely that there was a murder at a house, but you don't know what you're looking for. You can't write a general search warrant. Say, I just want to search this house for stuff dealing with this crime. You have to talk about the items you're looking for. Examples of some items, specific items that you might look for. A gun, drugs, crack, heroin, fentanyl, bloody clothes, latex gloves, data in a phone. That could be the item you're looking for. Child pornography, the area to be searched being a phone. And then you have to go into why you think it will be there. You talk about the crime, you talk about what you're looking for and where it's going to be. So there's a lot of different things that you could look for. If you're on an auto theft team, you might just be looking for car keys for fobs. You might be looking for the little iPads that they reprogram stuff with. Yeah, that's something that they do all the time. So be specific in what you're looking for. Okay. Now let's say it's a drug search warrant and you believe that this person is moving kilos. Do you want to say I'm looking for kilos of cocaine? Well, no, because then you can only look in large spaces. And what if they only have, what if they just sold those kilos and they only have a small amount? If you're, if it's a homicide search warrant and you believe they may have the gun, might it be reasonable to think that they would also have ammo? So if you're looking for an AK-47, but 7.62 millimeter ammo and magazines and et cetera, could tie it, you know, could show that that kind of weapon has been in that house, you may want to write for 7.62 millimeter ammunition because that may be all that you find, or some shell casings. So writing for something smaller, it enhances the scope of where you can search because you cannot search a shoebox for an AK-47. That's an invalid search. If you have a search warrant for that house and you wrote for a full-blown AK, that joker's like three feet long. So, no, you cannot open that shoebox. So the smaller of an item you can write for, you can search there. There's so many different items you can search for. Cell phones, you can be searching for a phone. Money, DNA, blood. Yes, you can do search warrants for DNA. We do it all the time. Blood, you know, these DUI cops, they write search warrants for blood. If you're going to be a career DUI guy, you might should know how to do that. So if people won't cooperate with you or they're knocked unconscious because you know their blood alcohol was a 0.2 and they flipped a car and killed somebody, you should probably know how to go ahead and do that search warrant. The crime, I already mentioned this. There needs to be a crime involved that you're investigating. And you should be able to articulate how your item or items probably that you're looking for are tied to that crime. So know the statute that you're investigating. And then location. We call this nexus, or what is the nexus to the location is the phrase you hear commonly. I've seen it often neglected. People are great at showing there was a crime. It's super easy. There's video of a shooting, boom, whatever. So you got a crime. You know you got a crime. You know you're looking for stuff from that crime. It's the nexus to the house or the car where things get a little shifty because that's the hard part. That's the only hard part, usually, is showing the nexus. So I like to go into a lot of detail in the next. That's where I do my extra stuff because other stuff is very easy. You also need to think about uh there's a phrase in search warrant law called saleness. Why would the item be there now? If this is a 10-year-old murder, is it likely that the gun used is still in the house? Well, fun fact there is case law about how long people tend to keep guns. There's case law that drugs tend to be either used or sold. Their shelf life is shorter. That's the whole point of drugs existing is to use them or sell them. Whereas people tend to keep guns. So if it's a gun used in a murder 10 years ago and that person doesn't even know they're under suspicion, you may be able to argue that they've always had that gun. They got that gun 20 years ago, and they probably still have that gun. Guns are not used or sold as much. So that's one thing you need to put about the location. Why would it be there now? Okay, something to think about. If they were, you know, if you're searching for bloody clothes and they were involved in a murder and uh, you know, maybe they got shot during, so you know they're bloody, and then they were seen an hour later leaving their house in clean clothes, you got a pretty good articulation that those bloody clothes are in that house, right? How do you explain what you're searching for? Lots of narcotics units. Hopefully, my narcotics guys are doing search warrants on search warrants, kind of your bread and butter. You're hitting them every week, right? So do drug dealers keep guns and scales and things of that nature? So you need to decide what you're writing for and if you have probable cause for what you're writing for. So let's say you're buying drugs from somebody, or you, however, you know this guy's a drug dealer, you're getting a search warrant on his house. Do you want to write for everything that any drug dealer has ever had? Hey, drug dealers tend to have guns. I've seen these paragraphs. Drug dealers carry guns. Literally, like there's bold at the top, it says like drug dealers carry guns. And then it'll be this generic boilerplate language on how drug dealers need to carry guns. I don't like that because there are rules that if you're there on a legal search warrant and you start finding things, generally the other things you find are admissible. So if you're searching for crack rocks and you're there legally for that, and you find a gun that the person shouldn't have, and the gun's with the crack, the gun's illegal, it's a crime gun, whatever. The guy's a felon, so he can't have it, you can still seize that gun because you came across crime. I would put that statute, the code in my warrant, uh making it clear as day that, hey, it's legal if I find other crime going on here, I'm actually required to go ahead and act on that crime. Whereas if you're just writing a general search warrant, like, uh, he's a drug dealer, so he's definitely got a gun. That's not really real. He might be a drug dealer that doesn't carry a gun. So just what I'm what I'm getting at is when you're searching for an item at a location, have probable cause for every item you're searching for. There's you can use search warrants for any kind of crime. Whatever you're working on, you can get cell phone search warrant, social media search warrants, all these companies, they generally retain some kind of data. And you can get private messages. I mean, go on the Facebook law enforcement portal, go on any of these. You can find out very quickly and easily. Talk to a more seasoned investigator. You'll find out what exactly you get from each company and what you don't get and if it would be worth it to your case. So just know what you're gonna get and whatever you're doing. If you're ever stuck, try to find something you can do a search warrant on and get the ball rolling because you can use search warrants to get more, like Rob and Al talked about. They're doing 100 search warrants. That first one might not be the gold mine. It might be the 40th one where you know you did a search warrant on uh social media and that gave you enough to get a search warrant on their phone. And now you got this, this, this. And now suddenly, boom, you've made made some headway. Excellent type of search warrant that hopefully everybody's using that's working any kind of crime with a victim is call detail records. I mean, if you're not getting search warrants for CDRs, uh, it's it's gold. It shows you exactly where people are, gives you pretty darn good locations. It refutes stories or it confirms alibis, whatever, and it helps you narrow your the focus of your investigation. So call detail record searches. That's a search warrant for data from phone companies. They're they're very easy to do. They're a light lift. The data's easy to sift through. So just if you're if you're investigating anything, uh you should be doing some kind of warrant. So let's get off that. Let's go ahead and get into the different parts of search warrants, some common issues with them, and uh kind of how to put together a whole package so that you can do a search warrant. It's not just one document, it's like four or five. So I'll go through those, okay? The affidavit. A lot of search warrant classes, if you go to training, it's called search warrants and affidavits. And they separate that because the affidavit, the search warrant is the actual judge's order. We'll get into that later. And the affidavit is your sworn statement of why there is probable cause, what you want to search, who you want to search for, and who's involved, why it's going to be there, why you want to search there, where you want to search. It's it often is a general case overview. There's I like to put bigger picture stuff in that search warrant affidavit. Help the judge who you're bringing this affidavit to to understand what's going on. Not just this tiny little snapchat, snapchat, snapshot of it, but give them an understanding so that when they're signing it, they're going, yeah, I understand. This person was shot. This other guy's involved, his cousin is accused of doing this, whatever the set of the set of information is. Give them a nice case background. When you're doing your affidavit, I always start it. We called it, uh, there's different names for it. I called it the I Love Me paragraph. What do they call it? Something, something and experience, training, CDE, something like that, something training and experience. But it's it's about what you've done and it it lends credibility to what you're saying so that then you can say things like, based on my training and experience. Because if you write that later in the warrant, where you're drawing a conclusion from a set of facts, if you haven't put out and sworn to your training and experience, hey, I've been to these 10 classes, I've been a cop for you know 18 years, I've done hundreds of search warrants, I've had over a hundred as the affian. I've had this many. Boom. You go through it. You do your why you're so great, basically why the judge should listen to you and where you've worked, what you've done, the units you've been on. I lay all that out. It's like one kind of long paragraph, and you put it into every single one. And it's just like, hey, I've I've been around for a minute, basically, is the the moral, the the general gist of it. I put photos in search warrants, or you know, pictures worth a thousand words. When I'm doing my affidavit, if I say something, let's say I had an informant buying things, my informant had a hidden camera on them, or they didn't, and I took pictures of the stuff afterwards. If I'm describing a buy, I'll put photographs from that buy. If we took pictures from distance, if we had video, I put on judges love that. They look at the actual AK-47 that was recovered on the scene. They see the bullet holes through the front of the house with the window shot out. I put that stuff in the affidavit. Go ahead and show the judge. You want them to sign it, right? You want them to find probable cause. Go ahead and show them instead of tell them. I think it helps a lot. Statements from witnesses that builds toward probable cause. There's so much stuff that builds toward probable cause. We could talk about it all day. I'll go later into the different tactics that build toward it. But what you need to know is an affidavit is a sworn statement. You are swearing to a judge that it's true. So everything needs to be just true facts in that thing. You can put some conclusions in there. I put a conclusory paragraph in mine at the end, based on my training and experience. And I sum up all the stuff that I saw and all the facts I gathered and sum it up in a nice neat paragraph at the end. One thing that you see, there's confidential informants, cooperating defendants, and then there's people whose names you're putting in there. I have found, I'm not sure if it's the law, but I found that judges tend to put more value on a person who's named than the other two. Depends on the informant. If you're using an informant, you are going to have to go into their background in there. Are they a convicted felon? Why are they working with you? Things of that nature. You have to explain their motivation. Are they giving you information for money? Do you have charges over them? And now they're they feel obligated to work with you or they're doing it to get out from under some charges, versus naming the person. So, you know, I've talked a lot about the prosecutor, law enforcement officer relationship. This is stuff you talk about with your prosecutor who is going to have to deal with the suppression hearing, the impending suppression hearing where they try to get this thing thrown out. Hey, should I put this person's name in there? Not if they're a confidential informant. No, absolutely not. But if they're a witness who feels nervous about being named in the affidavit or they're a cooperating defendant, are you going to name them? Or are you going to call them CD1 for cooperating defendant one? It's a great conversation to have with your prosecutor about if they feel it strengthens probable cause to name somebody. So let me go briefly into probable cause since we're talking about affidavits. I kind of look at it as a glass of water or milk, whatever, liquid. How full is it? And you can keep filling it up. You can have it full to the brim. That's proof beyond a reasonable doubt. You can have almost nothing in it. It might be below a reasonable or tasteable suspicion, which is a pretty low burden, low standard. You need probable cause. We can't we can't put a percentage on it. I talked with Christy about this. I told her I thought it was 51%. And she was like, nah, it's not that. Definitely not that. That's a preponderance of the evidence. Probable cause is lower than that. She's not going to put a number on it because the courts don't put a number on it. But she's a 31-year prosecutor. She probably has a deeper understanding of probable cause than me. Law enforcement officers, we need to be able to pretty much identify when we have it so that we know what we can do, when we can get a search warrant, when we can go in a house, whatever the case may be. When do we have an exception to the Fourth Amendment? So it's like a glass of water, and you can keep filling it with all these different tactics. So over time and through training and talking to people and gaining experience, you will come to understand the Fourth Amendment better. Your first six months, you're not going to have a good understanding of what probable cause really means. Two years in, it'll be better. Ten years in, it'll be better. So I just want to reiterate an affidavit is sworn. You are swearing to that to a judge. So never lie in an affidavit. Never, ever, ever. Then most play the places I've seen, there's always a couple of attachments. There's attachment A, attachment B. One of them will describe what you're searching for. This attachment will be supported by your affidavit. Your affidavit will describe why you're searching for that. Attachment B will describe where you want to search. Let's stick with a residential search warrant. You want to search a house. Keep it simple. You're searching for crack in a house, crack cocaine in a house. The what, you're going to describe exactly what you're looking for. You might say if it's a drug dealer, it's reasonable to think that they would have a scale, right? That's how people sell drugs by weight. So you might be searching for crack cocaine, powder cocaine, pyrex jars if you think they're cooking crack, digital scales, plastic baggies and other packaging materials. If they're moving bricks or large amounts of weed, you might be looking for a vacuum sealer if you've busted people with, you know, vacuum seals, things like that. So one of them, you're going to talk about exactly what you're looking for. Then you're going to talk about exactly where you're looking for it. So a little more on the what. I've already touched on size consideration. What you're searching for limits the scope of your search. So keep that in mind. If you're working fugitives and you get a search warrant on a house for a fugitive, I've done this on the Marshall Task Force. Search warrant for a person. That's all I was searching for in the house. And I've only I only did it a couple of times, but I did. I was directly involved in it. You cannot really reasonably open a bedside drawer in a nightstand. Can people get inside big drawers in a dresser? Yeah, maybe. Can they get between mattresses on a bed? Yeah, definitely. You can search there. But a nightstand, how about a washing machine? Absolutely. I found people folded up like a blanket in a laundry machine, in a washing machine, in a dryer. Little butt sticking out of there because they're in there tucked in. But with the door shut and everything. So just keep in mind that you limit your own scope. If you're searching for a fugitive, don't break that scope. Don't open that tiny drawer. Be reasonable. Whereas if you're looking for, say, your fugitive's ID card, because mom's saying she hasn't seen them in 10 years, and you go find an ID card in the house that was renewed three years ago, mom's lying to you. He might be here. But if you're looking for an ID card, you can look everywhere in that house. So keep that in mind, what you're writing for. Where you're looking, as in the address. We're going to stick with residential. If you're searching a house, let's say 123 Main Street, and in your affidavit, you hit a typo and you put 125 Main Street. Or on your attachment, you put 125. Or the house, you put the north side of the street and it's on the south side. Just double check your work. Because sometimes, for one, a lot of time you'll catch it later, and then you got to go back before the judge and fix it. And that's not a great feeling. I've done it several times. And some people just they don't ride by or they'll ride by once, but they don't really look, and then they pull a photo off Google Maps. And guess what? Since that photo, the house has done been shot up six times. The front porch is gone because some dude crashed his car through it. They've repainted it so it's a different color, and it now has a big security door because they're selling drugs out of there. That house looks to, and oh, and the roof has fallen in, so they just have targs. That looks like a different house, but it's the same house. Because on when you got it off Zillow, it was for sale and it looked good. Or vice versa, or they've cleaned it up and it's no longer ramshackle and they've added on. There's now a front porch and a back deck and all this stuff. Just get it looking right for your wear. Okay. I like to do a pretty simple description. 1, 2, 3 Main Street is a yellow one-story house that sits on the north side of West Main Street between Jimmy Street and Johnny Street. The numbers 123 are black and run vertically down the pole on the front of the house. There's a wheelchair ramp leading to the front door. Something like that. It's very clear and accurate and makes it very easy. So that's going to be your attachment B or attachment A, however y'all have it. Just have those two things referenced. I've talked a lot about dealing with prosecutors. I love dealing with them on the front end. So there's no the last thing I want is to bring them, you know, do a search warrant, and then some weird stuff happened. You know, you're looking for a gun, you find some child porn. Or, you know, if that happens, are they going to want you to type a new search warrant or are you good to seeds? It's nice to know that. Are phones written in? You can write, sometimes you can write not just for the phone, but for the contents of certain phones. If you're searching a house for a guy and you know he did something, can you write in that same affidavit for the data in the phone? And in the search warrant order, do you need to have a separate order for that phone? These little intricacies, that's stuff you talk to your prosecutor about. Vehicles, when you write search warrants, when you write the affidavit, when you do the attachment, you're asking to search the cartilage, meaning the surrounding areas on the property, reasonable areas. Let's say you know they shot somebody or they not even shot somebody, they just regularly use this gray Nissan with a South Carolina tag, blah, blah, blah. You want to search that car, right? If that car is parked on the street, are you going to write another search warrant for it? Or is it going to be covered? Are you going to name it in your search warrant? If it's on the yard, are you good? Or are you good for all vehicles on the property? But if you don't know that stuff, don't just go, yeah, we got a search warrant. And boom, you're searching everything. The cars on the street, oh, yeah, that's involved. We're searching. Like, it's not going to feel good when the prosecutor's like, oh, I don't think we're good on this. I think I wish you'd have called me because we got issues. Everything you're doing is preparing for the suppression hearing. You want that evidence to get in should it go to trial. Well, you want them to plead guilty, but if it goes to trial, you want that evidence to get in. And you can expect a suppression hearing on your search warrant, even if it's bulletproof, they'll probably a good chance they'll have one, and you want it to be bulletproof. So don't have done something willy-nilly. You don't want to be on the stand, and the defense attorney's going, where in this warrant does it mention a gray Nissan with a South Carolina tag? You say, Oh, it mentions it in the affidavit. I I talked about him using that in the shooting. And they go, Okay. Where go ahead and can you flip to attachment B here? I'll hand it to you. Defense Exhibit one is attachment B of the search warrant. Can you show me where you wrote that where you asked the judge for permission to violate my client's Fourth Amendment to infringe upon it and search his gray Nissan that you're claiming is his, allegedly? Oh, I didn't write it in there, but uh, okay, was it so I see you have permission to search vehicles on the cartilage? This vehicle was on a public city street. Is that right? You you took pictures of before you searched, right? Defense exhibit two. The officers own photographs of the vehicle on the public street. That's not the curdle. Just don't get in that position. Ask those questions and be clear. I'll stop going down that hole, but it's a simple mistake to make. Next part of the packet is the search warrant order, also just referred to as the search warrant. I always call it the order, just to separate it. This is a judge's order. A judge is ordering you to search a certain thing, be that a phone, be that an Instagram account, be that a house, a car, a body for DNA, whatever, within a certain time frame. If you don't within that time frame, if you have 10 days, 14 days, and you go 10 minutes over, it's moot. You blew it. It's too late. You need to turn that search warrant back into the court, unexecuted, and get a new one. If for some reason, say you get a search warrant for DNA and you're given 14 days to go get it, and this dude catches a flight to Tahiti for 14 days just on coincidence and comes back on day 15, you better not go collect that DNA because it's getting thrown out 100% chance. That's the easiest. That defense attorney is gonna look sharp because they're getting that tossed, bro. So don't do that. Be within the time frame. It says it right on there. You leave when you let's stick with the search in a house example. You're gonna leave a copy of that search warrant order at the house when you're done, or you're gonna hand it to the person whose house you're searching, one or the other. I think the law reads leave it in a conspicuous place. I always left it right on the table. There's no question about it. The order. Personally, I don't put details on the order. I incorporate attachments A and B. They're attachments. So for what I want to search, I don't put anything. I put C attachment A. For where to be searched, C attachment B. And those have all the details. Attachment B has the photo of the house I took last week with the description. Attachment A has what I'm searching for. But if you're gonna write it on the actual search warrant order, it needs to match up perfectly. Okay. I wouldn't do it, but hey, that's you. And now let's talk about the search warrant return. That's where you talk about what was taken. So boom, you get a search warrant for a house, your first one ever, you're all excited. We're not gonna say what's gonna happen, which is you're gonna go there and get nothing at all. Whatever. We're not gonna say that. Call it a goose egg. We're gonna say you go there and you just you have a great fine, you get nine ounces of cocaine and a pistol, okay? You're gonna describe those in detail in the search warrant return. So you need a copy of that, obviously. You need a copy of the search warrant, or you need copies of all the stuff, but we're gonna leave a copy of that search warrant return with them. Where it's basically a receipt. Hey, here's what we took from you guys. We're gonna let them know what we took. So personally, the way I like to do it, people do these differently. Some people are kind of vague. One Glock 19, 9mm pistol, 16 rounds of ammunition, one black magazine, white powdery substance, whatever. I like to do it more like this white powdery substance, parentheses field test positive cocaine located in bedroom number two, nightstand. And I uh found by Detective Jones, Detective C. Jones with a badge number. That makes it so easy when I write my report. Now I have it on there. I have a photograph of it, I have who's gonna testify about finding it. There's no question who found it. It's not, we're not gonna be in court, and it's well, who actually found it? And it's well, it was my search warrant, so you know I found it. No, who found it? Who put eyes on that thing? That's what you need to know. The photos will match that perfectly, and you leave a copy of the return. So, quiz time. What two things are you leaving copies of? That's right. The search warrant, order, and the return. You need to leave for them. And I'm leaving attachments A and B as well. That's uh I wouldn't leave the order without those because those are basically part of it. They're attached to that order. So that says where you are searching and what you are searching for. I know I talk about training day. Don't be like training day where you hand them a Chinese food menu. You're gonna go to jail if you do that. So you do not leave a copy of the affidavit. Will they get that during discovery? Yes. Discovery being the prosecutor hands over all the stuff to the defense. They'll get the affidavit. That's why you need to think about whose names you're putting in there. Is it the next door neighbor that they've already shot at five times and this person's out on bond? You might not want to put their name in there. Talk to your prosecutor because you do need to keep people safe. But don't leave the pro, please don't leave the affidavit on their table. That is, I mean, know the laws in your area. I think my voice just cracked a little bit. But just follow the rules. Let me say that clearly. But I've never heard of a place where you leave affidavits. So let's get into. I'm not going to go way into execution and operation planning, but let's get into it a little bit. Search warrant kit. What do you need in there? Hopefully, if you're on an experienced unit, they already have a kit and somebody's got that ready the night before. If I'm the case agent, I'm usually not prepping the kit. There's other people tooling around. I might do it, or I might be like, hey, Chris, can you get the kit ready? Get it prepped up, get copies of everything we need in there. Hopefully Chris is cool. Chris is like, yeah, doesn't get mad. He's like, that's your job. We don't want that. So stuff you're gonna want in there. Gloves so that you're not leaving your fingerprints and DNA or whatever all over everything. Be a pro. Drug test kits. If it's a drug warrant, even if it's not, I like to have drug test kits because don't seize grandma's ashes because you thought it was cocaine or fentanyl or something. Oh, it was a gray powder. I thought it was fen. No, bro, that's my grandma. You just tested my grandma. Just have have test kits. Evidence bags and paper bags. Know what goes on. Know how your evidence storage system affects fingerprints. Do you need to put it in a paper bag instead of a plastic bag? So think about that if you're playing at a fingerprint, a weapon. A good camera. I prefer to use a digital camera. I mean, partly because I'm super duper old, but also they just take better pictures. When you zoom in, they just do better, man. And they I think they're better than clogging up your work iPhone with 10 million pictures all the time of search warrants. The digital cameras, it's so easy. You plug them into the computer, you pull off all the pictures. They tend to be clearer. You got the metadata right there. It's easy as pie. Room numbers. I have seen, I have been the case agent on a search warrant where we missed a shotgun. And it was a pretty awful feeling. I was interviewing people. I put them in a room together after they'd been interviewed. And one of the guys goes, Looks the other one and goes, man, I'm I'm glad they missed that stick. Another guy was like, Yeah, that would have got us. And we'd gotten a couple guns. So why are they so concerned about this? I went in there, I was like, what stick? What are we talking about? They go like, Well, what are you talking about? I said, Man, I heard you. Do you want me to go type another search warrant and go back and hit that house? Like, what are we talking about? You want me to go kick the door again? And they were like, Oh yeah, y'all, y'all missed the hall closet. And that was my fault, 100%. I was managing, I should have been managing that warrant, but instead I got jazzed up and I was searching. And we missed a closet. There's a stolen shotgun in there, stolen Benelli shotgun. I still remember it. So room numbers and scene management. But yeah, I'm still on Search Warrant Kit. Have some room numbers in there. Don't just say the bath, the bedroom in the back on the left. I mean, it's just it's better to me. You can notate that in your report or if you do a sketch. Notepads. I like sketches. If you got somebody that's artsy fartsy, they can draw a great little picture of it on some graph paper and show and label where evidence was found, and that'll match the pictures and everything. Copies of the search warrant, go ahead and have those in there the night before. Are you going to have uh what's that paper called? Carbon paper, where when you write on one, it goes through. It's kind of nice for the search warrant return. If you need two copies, when you write on the top one, you have a piece of carbon paper stapled to it and another copy and it goes right through. And then you rip off that carbon copy and that's the one you leave there. Super duper easy. Yellow tape. I like having crime scene tape in there. If you're in an active neighborhood where people are going to show up, go ahead and tape it off because you've now drawn a line in the sand of you cannot come on this property. It's like, it's not an imaginary line anymore, a property line where people are like, I can come up in here and you're arguing with them about no, you can't. And they're like, yeah, I can take video from the yard. Put up the yellow tape, call it a crime scene. And if they cut your tape or push through it, they I think they realize they've just crossed the line. It's a literal yellow line. This doesn't really go in the kit, but your RAM, your hooligan tool or halligan tool, whatever, stuff you need to breach and make entry, go ahead and get that ready the night before. If you're going there at 6 a.m., don't be scrambling at five, going, who's got the RAM? The other team's got, who's got a RAM we can use? Miranda forms. If you're going to do interviews, a recorder to do recordings with. You maybe you do it on body cam, maybe you don't. But just having the forms, maybe some consent to search forms, maybe an arrest and booking form if you have those, so you don't have to go get one. But consent to search if there's something else, you know, if somebody else shows up. I've had this plenty of times. You're at a drug dealer's house and some other drug dealer shows up. Why not get go ahead and get consent to search? You know they're a drug dealer. You're like, I know that dude. He deals with this guy. I've seen him over here buying drugs from, selling drugs to him, whatever. Maybe get a consent to search on their car. A Cell Bright machine for dumping phones with somebody that knows how to use it. Can you dump phones on the scene? Can is consent a valid exception to a search warrant? Yeah. So can you say, hey, do you mind if I go ahead and download your phone? You can sit right here with me. We'll have it done by the time you leave. If they say yeah and they sign a little form saying, Yeah, go ahead and dump my phone, go on and dump that thing. It'll be fine. All right, getting off of the search warrant kit, gun dogs and drug dogs. Some agencies have gun dogs. They're absolutely amazing. They can find shell casings, they can find bullets. Go ahead and before you search through that place, let a gun dog or a drug dog do what they need to do. Now, I always do entry and entry and exit. I always do entry, video, and photos before any dogs or any searching happens. So we know exactly what it looks like. So let's say you just got all the tools. You got a gun dog and a drug dog, and you want to run them through. I go through and I take a video of the place. I take photos of the place, how it was before. Because I don't want these people saying, oh, they broke my $5,000 TV when their TV was already broken. It was already smashed. So I'm gonna go through and go ahead and do all that photo, video, and then I'm gonna take photos of all the rooms from different angles. I'm gonna have all that. I'm gonna put that in a file called before. And then this is after we've made entry into the house, of course. We've executed the search warrant, but we haven't searched. Then we're gonna go ahead and run the dogs. I go ahead and let them do their job. Most canine handlers, they don't want you to start searching and then be like, oh yeah, we got a dog. Like just let him do his job first. Once you start searching, I've seen it a million times. I've been guilty of it. I've learned from my mistakes, learned from my podcast, not by making these mistakes. Man, slow down. You've done all this work to get to this point of having a search warrant for a house. So why rush it and miss a closet with a stolen shotgun in it? That's not the move. So slow it down. You're gonna have somebody assigned to evidence. And when you find something, there's only one thing you should do. Photos. Just call it out. Photos. Don't touch it. Even if you think you found something, go ahead and call for a photo. You can say later in court, yeah, I thought that, I thought it was a gun. It ended up being a BB gun. Cool. If you pull it out to see if it's a gun, don't put it back for a variety of reasons. One, there may be an entry video or photos that show it in a slightly different position. And then next thing you know, that poor case agent is on the stand testifying that that gun was not touched before it was photographed. And now there's a side-by-foot side photograph. It's like that movie My Cousin Vinny, where they're just finding these little discrepancies. And it's like, you can't even argue with that. Like, yeah, the gun's in a different position. It's four inches from where it was because you put it back and you wrote in your report, it was photographed in place. So when you find evidence, all you do is go, photos. If the evidence guy is getting behind, if you have a good search warrant, you're getting, you know, you end up getting 25 people. Evidence, let the person who's taking notes, your evidence person, keep up. Let your photo person keep up. Hopefully they're working as somewhat of a team. Hey, I got a pistol in bedroom two. Boom. They're gonna come, they're gonna take a picture from further back, they're gonna take one medium, they're gonna take one close. That's how I like to do it. You're outside the room, you're up closer to the evidence, you're right up on the evidence. Then you remove it, it's clearly been moved, and you photograph it again once it's out. Now you're getting actual evidence photos, not just it's in a place. But please don't take it out, realize it's something, and put it. If you take it out, if you pull something out and you're like, this is a scale, like I should probably take pictures of that, set it on top of that dresser or whatever, let them photograph it, let the document person document it, and then tell them up front, yeah, it was in that drawer, but I didn't realize what it was. Like I was trying to move it out of the way, and then I realized this, it was actually evidence. So I thought it was flower, it was blow, you know, my mistake, but that's where it was. I'm showing you. I'll point on camera to where it was. But for God's sake, don't put it back. And then when you're finding stuff, don't have this mentality of, I don't want to go to court. If you're on the search team and you find something, just say you found it. Don't ask anybody to like, hey, Johnny, can you come find this? I haven't touched it. So they can come and find it. Don't, don't do that. Just find it. Yeah, I found it. Boom, I'm on there. If I have to go to trial in three years or in a year, it you're gonna testify for two seconds. Yes, I found that item there. Boom, you're cut loose. So, you know, don't taint the case. Jobs. You should know your jobs beforehand. You know, you're gonna basically have two jobs. You're gonna have your initial job, which you might be the breacher, you might be in the stack, you might be on perimeter, whatever. That's operational planning. Then once things have slowed down, once you've got the scene under control, people are in handcuffs, yellow tape's up, dog is done, blah, blah, blah. You're gonna have a job. You might be managing prisoners, you might be conducting interviews, you might be on the search team. That's usually the bulkiest team. There's multiple people searching. You might be the evidence person, you might be the photographer supervising. Is the supervisor gonna supervise? Personally, if I'm the case agent, I would rather supervise it myself. If I'm the supervisor, I would rather the case agent supervise it themselves. It's their baby. They've put all the work in. So they should be making sure that if people are rushing the evidence text, they're not. Hey, y'all need to slow it down. We might be here four hours. Y'all chill, quit rushing them. I'll go get you some biscuits if you're that hungry. I'll send somebody to get some biscuits if you're gonna have a fit. But I like personally, the case agent or the the detective, the lead detective, they're the master and commander of that scene. The supervisor's there to help out. I mean, I did the leadership as service or whatever. They're there to serve that person. Hey, what do you need? What other resources do you need? How can I help you? But that'll keep you from missing stuff. Somebody needs to be doing that. If you're the if you're the lead investigator, you don't have to get sucked into searching. I don't care if you feel like you're not doing your job. You, that is your job is to make sure that everything's done right and stuff's not getting brushed over. Stuff's not getting picked up and then put back and photographed. You need to be able to go, nah, I don't want it like that. Go ahead, take it out. You already moved it, go on, take it out. Let's go ahead and get into there, there's so much more. I mean, there's so much more. Hopefully, I can do some future episodes, interviews where people just tell me all the stuff I missed because there's there's always more. Probable cause development. I already said, you know, my analogy is you're filling a glass. You have all different tactics that you can fill that glass to the point you need. You want to get it to probable cause. Before you go to trial, you need to have it filled to beyond a reasonable doubt. You're filling the glass of proof. Some tactics that will develop you probable cause. You can be as creative as you want. I've said this before. Figure out stuff, not illegal, but creative within the law. Trash poles. Know the trash pole laws. That's one, it's so neglected. If somebody's selling drugs, shooting people, whatever, they throw stuff in their trash and then go put the trash cans on the street. Case law has said that trash is fair game. And if you've never been a cop in Florida and picked through, you know, fish bones and lobster tails and dirty diapers, man, you've never lived to find that one little thing that gets you in that house. It's every trash pull I've ever done, I've said afterwards, never again. But guess what? If you get in the house, if you solve that case, it was worth it. You know, it sucks. They're awful, but they work. Buys using informants or undercovers to make purchases from people of crime, criminal stuff. Interviews, interrogations. They can build, they can fill your glass a little bit. Keep using my dorky little analogy. Jail calls. Underutilized, super annoying. Right up there with trash pools. Listen to people go, hey, do you take care of that thing for me? What thing? You know that thing. Oh, the thing with the guy? Not that guy, the other guy. Like people, oh God, it's awful. It's so painful. But when you find that nugget where he says, hey, the cops got me. My tool is under the seat. I need you to move that for me. All right, where you want it? Bring my girl's house. Guess what? That tool is at that girl's house, and that tool is that gun that you need because it done got missed because we're humans and we missed it. So listen to those, especially if there's an event such as court, like a probable cause hearing that you think is going to trigger conversations on the jail phone. Go ahead and listen to that. Next thing you know, you're getting probable calls for houses or cell phones or any one of a cars or any or DNA or any one of a million things that you need. Jail calls are great. Title III Wiretaps. I mean, obviously, right? That's a huge source of information that is going to lead to. I mean, if if you have a halfway decent wire, you're going to get search warrants on houses at some point. Electronic search warrants. I mean, I've so many times I've I've done this. You're you feel like you're close, you have people pointing at somebody for doing some crime, and you're like, I'm just not there. I think I have enough for a search warrant on his Instagram. And his messages are just full of crime. Stuff you didn't even know he was doing. He's pimping girls flying around the country. And it's like, oh, well, now I can get in his house for sure. Surveillance. Surveillance is so underrated. People don't want to do surveillance. They get impatient. They'll give it an hour. Figure out when the hot times are. Do surveillance. Use your covert cameras. Use your stationary surveillance, mobile surveillance, all that stuff just leads to search warrants. Man, I have fun doing surveillance. I love catching people doing stuff. I've sat up in vacant houses for, I was going to say days, but let's call it weeks, where I'm in a vacant, in there driving nails, working on the house, acting like a construction crew. Who says you can't do that? You can. If you can, you know, get a reason. I'm not saying go start breaking into houses, but I've literally had a homeowner give me keys to a house and say, yeah, I'm fixing a tear up. There's like a platform in there. I'm gonna rip out the carpet and tear up the platform. And it was a neighborhood you could not really do much surveillance in. Guess what? I went in there and worked for days ripping out carpet, tearing out that platform, throwing wood in my pickup truck, getting rid of it, walking in with my toolbox with a camera in it and doing surveillance. And I got into a really good house, really crime-ridden house in a rough neighborhood and helped clean up that neighborhood. So do your surveillance. Uh pick-offs. If they're doing crime at a house and they're active, you're going to be able to stop people. And if you stop three people and all three of them have heroin and give statements that they just bought from that house, you might already have probable cause. I already mentioned undercovers. They don't just do buys, they can do all kinds of stuff. Undercovers can do phone calls. They can do, I mean, they can do tons, they the options are limitless. So again, just be creative with your UCs. If they're cool and creative, they'll have fun with it. I mentioned social media, public profiles. People post crazy stuff publicly sometimes. You know, dudes on federal release, three-time felons holding Dracos. It's like, okay, that's fine. Like, I can get a warrant. I think I'm pretty sure you've been shooting people, but now you're pointing a Draco at the camera saying all ops die. Like, okay, I'm coming in your house, bro. You done messed up. Post that publicly. Uh let's get into informants briefly. They're CIs, they're C R I's confidential, reliable informants. That's when they've been working for you probably for a long time. They've always been reliable. You don't know them to have ever lied. They've done a lot of buys. You start trusting these people, they're human beings. Guess what? They're criminals. That's why they can deal with criminals. So be very cautious. I know people, I've never personally done a search warrant just from a CRI. People do it. Hey, confidential reliable informant was in the house, said they saw a kilo. I mean, it's not that simple. They go into the background of the informant, blah, blah, blah. Personally, I'm sending you back in. I'm doing something to corroborate that information because what I never ever want to do is hit the wrong house. Have that CRI is mad at me. Their cousin just got arrested or got killed by the police in LA. So they're mad and they're ready to set me up for failure. And it has happened. It will happen again. So don't be a victim to your informant. Listen to them. Don't give them your full trust. Corroborate it. I'm not even going to say trust, but verify. Go, okay, thank you for the info. I'm sending you in there with video on. I'm going to send you in there with a recorder in your pocket. I'm going to send you in there with an undercover. I'm going to go watch that house for a while and see if you're lying. I'm going to do my job. So just think about that because once you get the search warrant, it's on you. It's not on the judge that signed it. It's on you. And if the info in it that you swore to is false, don't try to put it on the CI. Well, he lied to me. Well, yeah, he's probably a felon. He's probably done a bunch of stuff. That's why he can buy kilos of heroin, dummy. So don't trust every word he says, guy. Let's get into how to get educated. This podcast episode is almost over, and it is not good enough for you to go out and just start banging out search warrants. So let's talk about how to get there. So that when there's crime going on in your beat, you can go ahead and get a search warrant on it. Or whatever ward, beat, precinct, you can go ahead and knock that crime out of the park. I wrote podcasts on here kind of trying to be funny. You know, I'm covering this, there's several others. Hopefully, this gives you a baseline. It's just not going to be good enough for you to go. I mean, if you write a search warrant based on what you just heard, it's going to be subpar. So let's talk about the other realistic things. Prosecutors, go find one that'll work with you. It's not going to be everyone. Find one that's willing to teach you or teach a group of you. Maybe it may be just you. It may be, it may mean stepping out of your comfort zone and saying, hey, ma'am, I want to do a search warrant, but I don't really know what I'm doing. Do you have one I can look at? Can you teach me a little bit? And you find the right one, they'll say yes, and they will educate you. And then talk to another one, get another perspective. It's going to be a little bit different. They're all going to do it a little bit differently. If you're at a unit that does search warrants, if you're a detective, an agent, a drug investigator, a whatever, and there's search warrants there, read them. Ask the senior investigators. Hey, can I read some of your search warrants? I'm trying to learn this. I just got here. Or I've been here two years, but I still haven't done a search warrant. And I need to, I'm ready to do it. And on the same token, hey, can you sit down with me? Like, I'm going to read this, but can you then walk me through it? You find the right guy, they're going to, they're going to fill you in. They're going to be happy to sit down and go, yeah, here's what happened with this case. Here's why I went this way. Here's why I decided to get a search warrant then. A lot of supervisors were good investigators. That's how they got noticed. That's how they got ahead. So if there's a supervisor that's willing to give you the time of day and you heard, oh yeah, that guy was great in homicide for 15 years, then he promoted. Now he's supervisor patrol. He's probably more passionate about homicide than patrol. So ask him some questions. Hey, can you teach me search warrants, sir? Can I come in a little early and you school me up? A lot of them will do it. And then lastly and most obviously, go to some classes, go to some training. If you're not doing that, they're going to lay it out for you. I've done it in an hour. They're going to do it in 40. You're going to go into much more detail. You're going to look at actual search warrants. You might write an actual search warrant. They'll pick it apart. They'll mark you up. And then you'll do it again. So whether it's a three-day or five-day or freaking 10-day class, you're going to take some stuff away from that class. Go to some classes. Go to three or four. Hear different perspectives. So let me go ahead and kind of tie this thing up in a bow and wrap up this episode. You need to understand what probable cause is. You need to tie, once you establish probable cause, you need to tie it in with a crime, with the item or data that you're looking for and with the location. That's what it all boils down to. Is do you have probable cause of a crime and the evidence being at this location? And what are you looking for to do with that crime? Okay. Don't make clerical errors. Take the time to read your search warrant. And sometimes we we cruise over our own stuff. We start drifting because we already wrote it. Let a critical coworker read it. You don't have to follow their every piece of advice, but let your partner read it. Hey, can you read this warrant? They may move some stuff around that you're like, I don't think I really need to change that. Or they may catch something where you put the wrong freaking address. So those clerical errors will kill you. You end up with a fatal error. That's I'm pretty sure that's what they call them. Your warrant's done just because you screwed up and wrote the wrong numbers on a page. The prosecutor may want more. I've gotten very frustrated by this. Every seasoned investigator has gotten frustrated by a prosecutor asking for more. But guess what? It's better than the judge wanting more when you get in front of the judge. I have had search warrants on the federal side turned away. I've been told there's no probable cause, there's not enough probable cause here. I don't think it ever happened on the state side. Federally, I've been told no. And it hurts. I would rather the prosecutor tell me no. I would much rather the prosecutor or that initial judge tell me no than the judge it ends up in front of. And they decide that that warrant should be suppressed because it was bare bones, it was junk, it was full of fluff and conclusion, it was not full of fact. And now you made an arrest based on a search warrant. You incarcerated somebody, and the judge said that warrant's no good, and somebody just got away with murder. So I don't want that to happen. I'd rather they make me do an extra few hours work on the front end and we try to get through it. Just every warrant you're writing, expect a suppression hearing. That's where the defense attorney files a motion to suppress. Then there's a hearing about your search warrant where they go through it with a fine-toothed comb. In the motion, they're going to bash your warrant, and then there's going to be a hearing, and then the judge will rule and will give an order on the suppression hearing. And they will decide if the search warrant stands or not. So if you expect that, it makes you look at it a little differently. The goal is no longer let's get in this house. The goal is let's get through court. Let's talk briefly about the good faith doctrine. It covers, it keeps the warrant alive if it was sworn out and executed in good faith. If you lied in your affidavit, that's not in good faith. So it's no longer covered. The warrant is no good. It invalidates. But if you believe that there was probable cause, if the the judge can find that there was not probable cause, but that you didn't really err and you did it in good faith. You were doing your best. You thought there was probable cause. You didn't lie to the judge or anything stupid like that. And the judge that signed the warrant believed that it was valid. And boom, that's the good faith doctrine. That warrant's going to hold. They can say there was no probable cause, but it was signed and executed in good faith, the warrant stands. So what that means is once the judge orders the search the warrants are generally bulletproof unless you did something really egregious or you really cut some corners and the judge missed it. But they generally hold. So if you're concerned about a consent, if they're on the fence, go ahead and get the search warrant because the search warrant's going to hold. Just please, even when you're having a coworker reread it, content and organization. I've I've had like 85-page search warrants before. If you're doing that, somebody else may read it and go, because you know the case, right? So it may make sense to you. You're like, oh, I'm jumping from here to there, but it's all tied together and in your head it makes sense. And then somebody else reads and they're like, dude, this is like you might want to move paragraphs 37 and 38 up with paragraph two, because they really explain the big picture of what we're even doing here. But you got to that later. It was all fragmented. So they can help you with the organization. And they may also tell you, hey, I don't know if you got PC. You might want to think about like doing a trash pull or going and doing some surveillance for a couple days, getting a team out there because, like, it's a little iffy right here. What you got going on? Your affidavit, should it just be filled with conclusions? I should hear a chorus of no, should be filled with facts. At the end, what I like to do, I fill it with facts, and then I have a paragraph at the end, which says something like, Because I have a lot of training and experience, I put something like, based on my training and experience, and then I explain. I do a much more expanded version through the search warrant, but in that paragraph, I tie it together based on the fact that multiple witnesses identified Johnny as firing a gun during the incident. His call detail records, because I already did that search warrant, his call detail records place him there. When I previously interviewed him, he said he was not there, therefore he's a liar. And there's video of somebody that looks like Johnny firing the weapon. I believe that there's probably, and this shooting happened two days ago, people tend to keep guns and not sell them or use them or throw them away. There's probable cause that the firearm used in this shooting is currently at the house, something like that. That's just a general makeup thing, but it's or make-believe, it's a general synopsis of the facts that I already described and just clarifying them and making it make sense. We'll call it like a conclusory paragraph, something like that. It's the conclusion. But it's based on the facts you already laid out. It's not the conclusion of, yeah, Johnny definitely shot him because I think so. He he looks like him on the video. No, you're using facts to support yourself. And just avoid a bare bones search warrant. That's the legal term, bare bones. It just means it's it's lacking anything close to probable cause. You should have known better. And that's what you'll hear in suppression hearings is them saying this is a bare bones warrant. If you read the motion to suppress that the defense attorney filed, it'll likely accuse it of being a bare bones search warrant. It's not a bare bones search warrant, because you listened to this, you went to some classes, you ran it by your prosecutor before getting it signed, and everybody agreed. So it's not a bare bones search warrant. So don't get your feelings hurt because they're doing their job, but you do not want to have a bare bone search warrant. And what that comes from is trying to do too much, too fast, being in a rush. You went out the first day of surveillance, you're working drugs, you went out the first day, you got two pairs. Of people with cocaine, and they both said they got it from there, and you're like, I got it. And maybe you do, or maybe you could do a little more and make it airtight. So go to some classes, talk to some vets, talk to some prosecutorial vets, talk to some law enforcement vets, some supervisors, get good, run your work by those people without an ego, with a humble attitude of I want to get better. And no, because I've done five search warrants and you did 300 over the last 10 years, that doesn't make me as good or better than you. You're better than me. So go ahead and snipe my work a little bit and tell me what you think. Thank you. I hope you all took something away, and I look forward to hearing what I missed.