East Lansing training summarizes Fourth Amendment standards, surveillance tools and police stop rules

Kathy Swedlo, a lawyer and member of the East Lansing Independent Police Oversight Commission, led a community training that compressed core Fourth Amendment law into a two-hour session and walked attendees through how courts decide when police may search or seize people, places or things.

The training focused on why the Fourth Amendment matters locally: it governs when searches and seizures are “reasonable,” and it is the constitutional standard the U.S. Supreme Court uses to judge claims of excessive force. "The Fourth Amendment only cares about unreasonable search and seizure activity," Swedlo told the group. "If you have an interaction with a police officer and it does not meet the definition of search or does not meet the definition of seizure, the Fourth Amendment doesn't care."

Swedlo laid out the two core parts of the text — the reasonableness clause and the warrant clause — and the three-step factual approach courts use: (1) Was there a search or seizure? (2) If so, was it reasonable? (3) If it was unreasonable, what remedy applies? She emphasized that many common police encounters do not become Fourth Amendment events unless they meet the legal definitions of search or seizure.

On what courts count as a "search," Swedlo reviewed the Katz expectation-of-privacy test (an individual's subjective expectation of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable) and the Jones trespass…