Did you know there’s a good chance police have gone through your trash at least once?

theblaze.com

For reasons that aren’t immediately clear, social media is abuzz today about this 15-year-old article in which reporters for an Oregon alternative newspaper published the contents of city officials’ trash in order to prove a point.

The story is old, but the amazed reactions to it illustrate a valuable point: People do not understand that their trash is not safe from prying eyes, including the eyes of the police. In fact, if you live in a decent-sized city, there’s a pretty good chance that your local police have rifled through your trash at least once.

The background of the old article is simple: The city of Portland, Oregon, claimed (and still claims) to have the right to search through its citizens’ trash without a warrant. In that respect, they are not unlike most other cities in America, which have policies allowing police to search through citizens’ trash that is left out for pickup. And they have the support of the United States Supreme Court, which has held that these searches do not violate the Fourth Amendment.

As a result of this Supreme Court decision, most large city narcotics units have started doing random spot checks of citizens’ trash left at curbs, looking for drugs. That’s right: Every week, cops just pick the trash of randomly selected people and go through it in the name of the war on drugs, and it’s all perfectly constitutional, according to the U.S. Supreme Court.