Ron Livingston Quotes

An arrest is not justified by what the subsequent search discloses.

It would not be permissible for you to build a home and not let law enforcement in if they had a search warrant. If they think there's a crime ongoing, they go to court and get a warrant, and they're permitted to come in your home under the Fourth Amendment.

Asking questions is an essential part of police investigation. In the ordinary sense a police officer is free to ask a person for identification without implicating the Fourth Amendment.

The court’s agents may enter into men’s houses, break up their chests and chambers

The Constitution defends all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. What constitutes reasonableness depends upon threat.

Police officers must act quickly to seize wrongdoers and obtain evidence while protecting themselves and bystanders. It is easy to second-guess their search-and-seizure decisions in a secure courtroom.

A person's mere propinquity to others independently suspected of criminal activity does not give rise to probable cause to search that person.

It must always be remembered that what the Constitution forbids is not all searches and seizures, but unreasonable searches and seizures.

All was well, until I reached the port of Havre. Three officers with the rank of lieutenant, whom afterwards I knew to be Scotland Yard men, came aboard and demanded to see my papers which they took away from me.

Rule of law is based on probable cause.

The U.S. Supreme Court has eviscerated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, giving the police license to sweep communities, to conduct 'stop and frisk' operations.

If a police officer is looking for a criminal, he or she might stop a number of people in that particular area and ask to see their driver's license. No one bellyaches about civil rights or privacy issues. We're just happy the cops are trying to find the bad guy.

We're all amateur investigators. We scan bookshelves, we ogle trinkets left out in the open, we calculate the cost of furniture and study the photographs on display; sometimes we even check out the medicine cabinet.

Let us hear the suspicions. I will look after the proofs.

Yet far from putting any meaningful constraints on law enforcement in this war, the U.S. Supreme Court has given the police license to stop and search just about anyone, in any public place, without a shred of evidence of criminal activity, and it has also closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias at every stage of the judicial process from stops and searches to plea bargaining and sentencing.

When the police officers knock on your door with a warrant, they don't expect you to give them a tour. It's supposed to be an adversarial process so that it's used in these extraordinary powers are applied only when there's no alternative. Only when they're absolutely necessary, and only when they're proportionate to the threat faced by these individuals.

Criticism always seemed to me a lot like police work. You look for clues, fingerprints, motives. You need to construct an airtight case.

Where is the expectation of privacy in the commission of a crime?

Curiosity begins as an act of tearing to pieces or analysis.

I wanted to be a police detective. In my work, particularly in documentaries, I am obsessed with finding things out, seeking ever-new facts and perspectives - each project can involve years of research.

You don't need any indictment in order to arrest someone; probable cause is sufficient to arrest civilians, so it must be enough to arrest police.

Either we need to redefine what probable cause means and say that police are not subject to it, or we arrest officers right away just as we would with any other person accused of committing a crime. Either we write new laws or enforce existing ones; we cannot have it both ways.

In fact, I had previously helped train one of the FBI agents who searched my apartment.

Science is curiosity, testing and experimenting.

Without the burden on the police to adhere to the requirements of the 4th Amendment, you loose the dogs.