Arkansas Open Carry: Understanding Law Enforcement’s Legal Capability Under a Difficult Statute

“There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms.”1 Although the United States Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller established a fundamental understanding that individuals have a right to own a gun for personal use, the Court recognized that, as with all fundamental rights, the individual right to keep and bear arms is “not unlimited.”2 A few limits the Court mentioned included “prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”3 Naturally, the Heller decision left us with this question: What are the constitutionally sound restrictions, and how far can the government go?

Survey of Washington Search and Seizure Law: 2019 Update

This survey is intended to serve as a resource to which Washington lawyers, judges, law enforcement officers, and others can turn as an authoritative starting point for researching Washington search and seizure law. In order to be useful as a research tool, this Survey requires periodic updates to address new cases interpreting the Washington constitution and the U.S. Constitution and to reflect the current state of the law. Many of these cases involve the Washington State Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Washington constitution. Also, as the U.S. Supreme Court has continued to examine Fourth Amendment search and seizure jurisprudence, its decisions and reflections on Washington law are also discussed. Often the rules and approaches in interpreting the Washington constitution differ in certain areas from the analysis used by the U.S. Supreme Court in its Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Where that occurs, this Survey has identified the independent approach adopted by the Washington State Supreme Court. This Survey contains updated case comments and statutory references that are current through March 2019, and focuses primarily on search and seizure law in the criminal context; it omits discussion of many procedural issues, including those arising under court rules that implement constitutional protections. In addition, all references to Wayne R. LaFave, Search and Seizure: A Treatise on the Fourth Amendment, have been updated to the fifth edition, published in 2012

Is metal theft committed by organized crime groups, and why does it matter?

Using the example of metal theft in the United Kingdom, this study used mixed methods to evaluate the accuracy of police estimates of the involvement of organised crime groups (OCGs) in crime. Police estimate that 20-30% of metal theft is committed by OCGs, but this study found that only 0.5% of metal thieves had previous convictions for offences related to OCGs, that only 1.3% were linked to OCGs by intelligence information, that metal thieves typically offended close to their homes and that almost no metal thefts involved sophisticated offence methods. It appears that police may over-estimate the involvement of OCGs in some types of crime. The reasons for and consequences of this over-estimation are discussed

The Fourth Amendment Limits of Facial Recognition at the Border

On any given day, hundreds of thousands of people enter the United States through ports of entry along the Mexican and Canadian borders. At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) seizes millions of dollars’ worth of contraband entering the United States annually. Under the border-search exception, border officials can perform routine, warrantless searches for this contraband, based on no suspicion of a crime, without violating the Fourth Amendment. But as DHS integrates modern technology into its enforcement efforts, the question becomes how these tools fit into the border-search doctrine. Facial recognition technology (“FRT”) is a prime example. To date, no court—and few legal scholars—have addressed how the Fourth Amendment would regulate the use of FRT at the border. This Note begins to fill that gap. This Note contends that, after Carpenter v. United States, the Fourth Amendment places at least some limits on the use of FRT at the border. Given the absence of caselaw, this Note uses a hypothetical border search to make three core claims. First—distinguishing between face verification and face identification—this Note argues that face identification constitutes a Fourth Amendment “search” only when the images displayed to a border official reveal “the privacies of life.” Second, because of its invasive nature, this form of face identification is a nonroutine border search and is unconstitutional when conducted without reasonable suspicion. Lastly, this Note concludes that a border official’s reasonable suspicion must be linked to a crime that bears some nexus to the purposes underlying the border-search exception