Emergencies and Exigencies

A close cousin to the searches for evidence under exigency is the emergency doctrine, sometimes called the community caretaking.  While the police oftentimes investigate criminal activity, the police are also public safety professionals, protecting the public generally.  For instance, if the police respond to a welfare check of an elderly citizen and come to believe that this senior citizen is in need of aid, the police may make entry into the Constitutionally protected area to rescue the person or otherwise render aid.  Clearly, it is reasonable for the police to do so.  The Supreme Court has addressed a couple of circumstances where the police entered when a melee was taking place and even an entry to protect an person from self to himself.   

Legal Supplement

Brinham City v. Stuart, 547 U.S. 398 (2006),

One exigency obviating the requirement of a warrant is the need to assist persons who are seriously injured or threatened with such injury.

Accordingly, law enforcement officers may enter a home without a warrant to render emergency assistance to an injured occupant or to protect an occupant from imminent injury. Mincey, supra, at 392; see also Georgia v. Randolph, 547 U. S. ___, ___ (2006) (slip op., at 13–14) (“[I]t would be silly to suggest that the police would commit a tort by entering … to determine whether violence (or threat of violence) has just occurred or is about to (or soon will) occur”).

Respondents further contend that their conduct was not serious enough to justify the officers’ intrusion into the home. They rely on Welsh v. Wisconsin, 466 U. S. 740, 753 (1984), in which we held that “an important factor to be considered when determining whether any exigency exists is the gravity of the underlying offense for which the arrest is being made.” This contention, too, is misplaced. Welsh involved a warrantless entry by officers to arrest a suspect for driving while intoxicated. There, the “only potential emergency” confronting the officers was the need to preserve evidence (i.e., the suspect’s blood-alcohol level)—an exigency that we held insufficient under the circumstances to justify entry into the suspect’s home. Ibid. Here, the officers were confronted with ongoing violence occurring within the home. Welsh did not address such a situation.

[T]he officers had an objectively reasonable basis for believing both that the injured adult might need help and that the violence in the kitchen was just beginning. Nothing in the Fourth Amendment required them to wait until another blow rendered someone “unconscious” or “semi-conscious” or worse before entering. The role of a peace officer includes preventing violence and restoring order, not simply rendering first aid to casualties; an officer is not like a boxing (or hockey) referee, poised to stop a bout only if it becomes too one-sided.

Michigan v. Fisher, 558 U.S. 45 (2009),

Officers do not need ironclad proof of “a likely serious, life-threatening” injury to invoke the emergency aid exception. The only injury police could confirm in Brigham City was the bloody lip they saw the juvenile inflict upon the adult. Fisher argues that the officers here could not have been motivated by a perceived need to provide medical assistance, since they never summoned emergency medical personnel. This would have no bearing, of course, upon their need to assure that Fisher was not endangering someone else in the house. Moreover, even if the failure to summon medical personnel conclusively established that Goolsby did not subjectively believe, when he entered the house, that Fisher or someone else was seriously injured (which is doubtful), the test, as we have said, is not what Goolsby believed, but whether there was “an objectively reasonable basis for believing” that medical assistance was needed, or persons were in danger, Brigham City, supra, at 406; Mincey, supra, at 392.

It does not meet the needs of law enforcement or the demands of public safety to require officers to walk away from a situation like the one they encountered here. Only when an apparent threat has become an actual harm can officers rule out innocuous explanations for ominous circumstances. But “[t]he role of a peace officer includes preventing violence and restoring order, not simply rendering first aid to casualties.” Brigham City, supra, at 406. It sufficed to invoke the emergency aid exception that it was reasonable to believe that Fisher had hurt himself (albeit nonfatally) and needed treatment that in his rage he was unable to provide, or that Fisher was about to hurt, or had already hurt, someone else. The Michigan Court of Appeals required more than what the Fourth Amendment demands.