Does Increasing Police Professionalism Make the Fourth Amendment Unnecessary

American policing has become more in the sense that today's police tend to be much better paid, trained and credentialed than the police of yesteryear. But do these measures of professionalization translate into greater security from unreasonable searches and seizures by police? Should America's criminal courts abandon oversight over search-and-seizure practices in light of this greater police professionalism? This article examines this question, marshaling findings from studies of police searches under differing circumstances. It concludes that lower success rates associated with warrantless police searches as compared to searches made with warrants demonstrate that modern police investigators continue to pose severe threats to the security of people from unreasonable searches and seizures.In a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court opinion, Hudson v. Michigan, at least four Supreme Court justices indicated a willingness to abolish or severely restrict the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule. Among their grounds for so fundamentally altering American criminal procedure was the growing body of literature indicating that American police officers have become more professional in recent years. The justices suggested that this professionalization has made the exclusionary rule unnecessary to deter future officers from participating in unreasonable searches and seizures.The Fourth Amendment states that [t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. This language does not specify what remedy should apply when investigators violate the Amendment, but the Supreme Court has applied the exclusionary rule to most Fourth Amendment violations in federal criminal courts since 1914 (Weeks v. United States) and required state courts to follow the exclusionary rule since 1961 (Mapp v. Ohio). In general, this means that illegally seized physical evidence-like illegally extracted or coerced confessions-are withheld from the purview of juries in criminal trials. 4Since the 1961 Mapp decision, however, a backlash against the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule has been unleashed by conservative judges and legal scholars (Roots, 2009). Such judges and scholars argue that only civil remedies are required by the Fourth Amendment, meaning that victims of unreasonable searches and seizures should merely be able to sue in separate civil proceedings. This view denies that the rule of exclusion constitutionally required, and describes the rule as a mere prudential [rule] aimed at stemming the tide of warrantless searches rather than constitutionally mandated (Penn. Bd. Of Prob. & Parole v. Scott, 1998). Accordingly, this view posits that when America's police departments demonstrate appropriate levels of compliance with the Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court may abolish the exclusionary rule. The Supreme Court's 2006 Hudson decision moved the Court's jurisprudence closer to a conservative model that would admit any and all relevant evidence in criminal proceedings regardless of whether police illegally seize the evidence.Hudson v. Michigan (2006) dealt with the question of whether evidence seized after police forced open an unlocked residential door within seconds upon announcing their presence while executing a warrant should be excluded from evidence. The search violated the traditional and rule requiring that searchers must first knock and announce their presence and then pause for a reasonable time before breaking open the doors of homes to be searched. This requirement, as Justice Scalia conceded, is an ancient one in search-and-seizure law. (Justice Breyer in his dissent noted that the knock-and-announce requirement had been traced back to the 13th century. …