Given the circumstances that have been presented to you, what do you do?
Sometimes an event cannot be immediately classified as either an active event or an inactive event. In these cases, where the information is less clear, the investigator may be justified to assume an ongoing danger to the life or safety of persons, and remain in the tactical investigative response mode utilizing the powers afforded under exigent circumstances to pursue the investigation until it is determined that an implied danger no longer exists. For example, consider the situation where police dispatch receives a 911 call from a woman crying. Before any further information can be obtained from the caller, the call is terminated from the caller’s end. A patrol unit is dispatched to attend the residential address associated with the identified phone number. Upon arrival at the front door of the caller’s address, attending officers are met by a male resident of the home who identifies himself as the home owner. The attending officers advise the male that a terminated 911 call from a crying woman was received from this address. The male states that there is nothing wrong in his home and he refuses to allow officers to enter the premises. The officers advise the male that they need to enter the premises to satisfy themselves that there is no ongoing threat to the life or safety of the crying woman caller. The officers warn the man that they will be entering the premises and if he resists he will be arrested for obstructing a police officer.
The man steps aside and the officers enter the home and find a woman in the bedroom area with a bleeding nose and a bruised face. The woman tells officers that the male, her husband, punched her in the face during an argument and when she attempted to call police he ripped the phone cord from the wall and struck her again. She states that he threatened to kill her if she cried out when the police came to the door. The man is arrested for assault, kidnapping, and interruption of a communications device. He is provided with his Miranda Warning, and he is then asked if he wishes to make any statement.
To evaluate this scenario, the officers had very little information in the first instance that would allow them to make a determination of active event or inactive event. The information to identify a criminal act was equally limited. Fortunately, case law has evolved to recognize this kind of information-limited case, and it provides a framework for making a response that can protect life and safety. In such situations, an officer is still empowered to act under the authority of “exigent circumstances”. Considering information-limited circumstances like this, the officer only needs to have a suspicion that there is a threat to the life or safety of a person to act. That threat may be simply implied by the circumstances being presented. In this case, the implied threat to life or safety of a person was the disconnected 911 call. The officers had a duty to attend and resolve the possible threat to life or safety of a person implied in this disconnected 911 call.
..when you are greeted at the door by the male subject, he presents to you very calm and cooperative. He is polite and respectful, dressed very nice, you notice no items in the home out of place, and no one is in sight. He tells you that he is a law student and knows that you can't enter the home with out a search warrant then says that you may NOT enter his home. So far you only know that a female has called 911 and was crying.
- Given the circumstances that have been presented to you, what do you do?
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