I’m not yet accustomed to the unprecedented greed, cruelty, and staggering incompetence of the second Trump Administration. But it’s their total disregard for the Constitution and laws of our country that keeps shouting in my ear that I have to speak up. The latest example of this is the Homeland Security memo that instructs ICE officers they have the right to break into homes, to kick down doors and drag the occupants out—as they actually did in Minnesota—to accomplish an arrest.
They don’t. It’s illegal and unconstitutional. It always has been. The police have been barred from doing this since the very first days of our republic, and every real police officer knows this. It’s not even a close call. The misinformation provided by DHS represents a complete disregard for our laws. The administration has made the cynical decision that they can just ignore the Constitution, and the people whose rights they’re violating will be in no position to contest it if they’ve been shipped off to El Salvador or Uganda.
Whenever somebody tells you something like I just did, you have to consider the source. Who is this information coming from? What are their credentials? And do they have a dog in the fight—do they stand to gain from providing false information? Let’s take 100 words to answer those questions. I fought crime in this county as a prosecutor for fifteen years; my specialty was search and seizure law. I was elected to the Orange County Superior Court here—in part because I had virtually unanimous support from law enforcement—and spent ten years in the criminal courts. A Republican governor appointed me to the Court of Appeal, where I served for twenty-seven years, reviewing the legality of searches and seizures. I trained Orange County police officers for two decades.
So I’m not some tyro legal expert who sat down last week and devoted an hour to learning the law in this area. And I’m not some woke lefty whose Trump Derangement Syndrome makes him attack everything the administration does. But I do have a dog in this fight: I am dedicated to defending the American Constitution. I believe it is the foundation for our 250 years as the greatest nation on the planet. I’ve taken an oath to defend it several times. I still feel bound by those oaths, and I will defend it to my death.
As will every cop you know. The vast majority of California police officers have learned the Constitution—many of them from me—and they abide by it every day. They do so even when they don’t like it. The knock-notice rule, the rule the Trump administration is now flouting, is one they especially hate. The knock-notice rule requires every police officer, even if they have a warrant signed by a judge for search or arrest—a real judge, who has decided it is probable that there is contraband, evidence of a crime, or a criminal inside—must knock, identify themselves, announce their purpose, demand entry, and give the occupants a reasonable amount of time to open the door.
“Knock, knock, knock. This is the Huntington Beach Police Department. We have a warrant to search these premises, and we demand entry. Open the door!” That is what the police are required to do before they can enter. If they don’t, the evidence they find is suppressed. You can imagine how unpopular that law is. I fought against it for fifteen years as a prosecutor. The problem is the damn thing’s been around for five centuries. It’s not something dreamed up by a hippie legislature in the sixties.
It’s been a part of the common law for five centuries. You can find it in Semayne’s Case in 1603. The founding fathers were well aware of the rule and its inclusion in the Fourth Amendment has been understood throughout our history. Keep in mind, our Constitution was written by rebels. They had just fought a long and ugly war for hitherto unknown freedom. They had suffered and died for that freedom, and they weren’t about to give it up. So they wrote a Constitution that was designed to limit the government, to prevent the kind of governmental abuse we’re witnessing now.
They specifically designed a part of the Bill of Rights, the Fourth Amendment, to stop that abuse. The king’s troops had been breaking down doors and dragging away citizens, just as the king’s troops are doing now. The only difference is that George III’s troops were not masked secret police. You don’t need a constitutional law scholar to tell you this. You don’t need a Fourth Amendment expert—although I am one. Any beat cop knows the knock-notice rule. And I am proud to say that my fifty-five years of watching law enforcement in Orange County has made it clear to me that they take seriously their constitutional duty to abide by it.
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William W. Bedsworth served as an associate justice of the California Court of Appeal from 1997-2024. Prior to that, he served as an Orange County Superior Court judge from 1987–1997.
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