RUBBISH! Portland's top brass said it was OK to swipe your garbage--so we grabbed theirs.
OK, so twice a week you roll your garbage out to the curb. After that you probably never give it a moment's thought, right? After all, why should you? It's garbage, after all.
Well, if you live in Portland, OR, and the police think that you may be involved in a crime, your garbage is fair game. What seems a smelly, silly problem suddenly becomes a privacy issue. DOES the state have the right to confiscate and sift through your garbage merely on the suspicion that you may be involved in criminal activity. Does the simple act of putting the trash on the curb render it property of the state?
Back in March, the police swiped the trash of fellow officer Gina Hoesly. They didn't ask permission. They didn't ask for a search warrant. They just grabbed it. Their sordid haul, which included a bloody tampon, became the basis for drug charges against her (see "Gross Violation," below).
The news left a lot of Portlanders--including us--scratching our heads. Aren't there rules about this sort of thing? Aren't citizens protected from unreasonable search and seizure by the Fourth Amendment?
The Multnomah County District Attorney's Office doesn't think so. Prosecutor Mark McDonnell says that once you set your garbage out on the curb, it becomes public property.
"She placed her garbage can out in the open, open to public view, in the public right of way," McDonnell told Judge Jean Kerr Maurer earlier this month. "There were no signs on the garbage, 'Do not open. Do not trespass.' There was every indication...she had relinquished her privacy, possessory interest."
Police Chief Mark Kroeker echoed this reasoning. "Most judges have the opinion that [once] trash is put out...it's trash, and abandoned in terms of privacy...."
Yes, this is a silly exercise, but also a very important one for civil libertarians- or just those of us who want our trash to sit on the curb unmolested. Of course, if the police are going to double as garbagemen, I'm wondering if they need a license for that?
