Privacy Through a Cop's Eyes

**Andrew Heaton** (0:07)
Hello and welcome to The Political Orphanage, a home for deep thinkers and responsible drinkers. I'm Andrew Heaton, and I am both of those things, just rarely at the same time.
And I live by several maxims, which unfortunately I cannot now remember. Save one, I don't want to be wrong any longer than I have to be. If it turns out I'm wrong about something, I would like to know, so I can course correct. For that reason, we're going to do some pushback on the program this week. Someone who is an expert in their given field reached out to me to say, love the show, but your guest got something wrong. Or you did, Heaton. Or maybe they weren't wrong exactly, but things were very one-sided.
Last month, Naomi Brockwell came on to talk about privacy and specifically to warn us about its atrophy as technology and the third-party doctrine increasingly interweave. Shortly thereafter, a police officer reached out to say, hey, that's not exactly right. We will hear from Sergeant Mike momentarily and get an idea of what privacy laws look like from the perspective of a cop. Then that same cop will stick around for a special bonus episode where I just pelt him with uncomfortable police questions, like, who's more likely to be corrupt, big city cops or small town cops? And I even work up the nerve to talk to him about public pensions. That's on the bonus episode. But for now, enjoy privacy, surveillance, and the Fourth Amendment as understood by a police officer.
Mike is a 20-year police officer and presently a sergeant, supervising a squad of violent crime detectives. I am going to politely refrain from mentioning his last name and precinct as Mike is very much here on behalf of himself, offering insights as a fellow political orphanage and a part of our community and decidedly not as an official mouthpiece of his organization. So we can rely on his experience. But to be very clear, he's not officially speaking for anybody. Hello, Mike. Did I get the throat clearing? Are we okay there?

**Mike** (2:24)
Yes. I'm very clear at this point.

**Andrew Heaton** (2:27)
Okay, great. Good. But you are a police officer. This is your professional life. You've been doing it for over two decades. What all have you worked in?

**Mike** (2:33)
I'm actually just a little short of two decades, but in that time, I've done patrol, I've done street crimes, I've done community-oriented policing, and then I've also supervised as a supervisor mostly of investigations in the latter half of my career.

**Andrew Heaton** (2:48)
I'm excited to have you here. I'm flattered that you reach out to me. You're a part of our community, you're a listener of the show, and as a police officer, had a very different interpretation of some of my previous guests on the program and some of my previous positions. So about a month ago, I had Naomi Brockwell, she's a privacy expert on. Her big thing was a bill that Thomas Massey proposed that would basically define any type of criminal inquest into a third party as something requiring a search warrant. So if I, the police, want to go to Google and say, hey, can you tell us if Andrew Heaton has accessed Google in any particular location or whatever that thing is, that would require a search warrant.
Are you okay with that? Do you want to modify it? Is it a bad idea? Where are you?

**Mike** (3:36)
Well, I think what happens when a lot of the security and privacy experts come on, I think, first of all, I want to say that I'm a privacy advocate as much as anybody else is, I think, generally speaking, some of the most private people I know are the officers that I work with. They very much understand that we don't want the government in our lives if they're not supposed to be. And I don't want to be in somebody's life unless they need me to be for an emergency.
That's just how I feel about it personally. And I know that there's a lot of officers who do the same way. You'll find lots of cops who live on 40 acres in the middle of Tennessee on a rocking chair sipping whiskey because they don't want neighbors. They don't want anybody around them. So I want to say first and foremost that I don't begrudge anybody for wanting their privacy. I think that that is very important. And wanting their anonymity when it's appropriate. I think what I got hung up on is she said something, and I'm going to paraphrase her. She said something like, if we needed to develop leads to investigate a crime, we should have to get a warrant to search people. And if we already know who the people are, we should be getting the warrants. And it sounded almost like circular logic of like, if you have a suspect, you should get a warrant to search on them, to develop leads on them. But in order to develop leads, you should already know who your suspect is. And there's a point where we have to start the investigation. And often we start from unknown suspect. Most of the reports I read start with unknown suspect. And we have to start somewhere. And the level of the lawful, the standard of probable cause is one of many that we use in law enforcement. And this was taught to me kind of offhand many years, and I think other cops in the audience will understand this, is that we have reasonable suspicion, probable cause, preponderance of the evidence, clearance convincing evidence, and proof beyond a reasonable doubt.