Lifting The Lid on Garbage

By Alain L. Sanders

Putting out the garbage is one of life's duller necessities. Last week that boring chore became a bit riskier. By a 6-to-2 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police may freely rummage through ordinary household trash left at curbside without obtaining a search warrant. The decision was welcomed by the law-enforcement community, which has learned that garbage contains a lot of incriminating ingredients, but it upset civil libertarians. They read the opinion as a tightening of the judicial noose around the already embattled right of personal privacy.

The court's pronouncement involved the garbage of Billy Greenwood of Laguna Beach, Calif. In 1984, after learning from an informant that Greenwood might be dealing drugs and after observing a parade of cars making brief nocturnal stops at his posh hilltop home, Police Investigator Jenny Jones asked the local refuse collector to turn over the brown plastic trash bags in front of the house. Clawing through the contents with rubber gloves, officers uncovered a rich nest of drug-related paraphernalia: razor blades, straws containing cocaine residue, and phone bills listing calls to people with drug records. Based on this evidence, the police obtained a warrant to search the house, found cocaine and hashish inside, and arrested Greenwood. He protested the original warrantless investigation of his trash bags, claiming it violated the Fourth Amendment ban against unreasonable searches and seizures. Two California courts agreed with Greenwood, but last week the highest court resoundingly rejected his argument.

"It is common knowledge that plastic garbage bags left on or at the side of a public street are readily accessible to animals, children, scavengers, snoops and other members of the public," declared Justice Byron White for the majority. Requiring police to seek warrants before searching such refuse would therefore be inappropriate, he wrote. Rubbish, responded Dissenters William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, who predicted that "members of our society will be shocked" by the court's ruling. "Scrutiny of another's trash is contrary to commonly accepted notions of civilized behavior," they maintained. "A single bag of trash testifies eloquently to the eating, reading and recreational habits of the person who produced it."

Police agencies readily admit that they can learn a lot about a person by examining household garbage. Both the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration regularly engage in trash searches, as do many police departments. "People throw away all kinds of things," observes Hubert Williams, president of the Police Foundation. "Phone numbers, trace evidence, bank statements -- you'd be amazed." Most lower courts that have reviewed police trash searches have given them the green light, and now that the high bench has done the same, more detectives can be expected to prowl through refuse.

To Arthur Spitzer of the American Civil Liberties Union, the decision "is one more step in squeezing the right to privacy to the point where Americans will no longer feel secure against the prying eye of Big Brother." Although their assessments are less dire, other legal observers are concerned too. "The message is, Be careful of what you put in the garbage," says New York University Law Professor Graham Hughes. Predicts Sanford Kadish of the University of California, Berkeley, law school: "This may create a run on incinerators and shredders." Last week's ruling did not, however, surprise many legal scholars. In recent years the Supreme Court has taken a narrow view of the right to privacy and has given police broad powers to search cars, inspect fenced-in fields, and spy on house plots from the air without a warrant.

The public reaction to the legal rifling of garbage by police is not yet clear, but there are many reasons for alarm. Just how embarrassing a search can be even for innocent parties was demonstrated in 1975, when the National Enquirer made off with five bags of refuse from outside the home of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and published its gleanings. Other celebrities have also had their garbage snooped. In some fundamental sense, we are what we throw away. The prospect of having the authorities snoop in such intimate realms is enough to make one wish upon them more of what FBI agents say is the worst peril of garbage searching: dirty diapers.

With reporting by Anne Constable/Washington and James Willwerth/Los Angeles