Search Incident to Lawful Arrest

Search Incident to Arrest (SITA) doctrine is an exception to the general requirement that police obtain a warrant before conducting a search. The purpose of this exception is to protect the officer by locating and seizing any weapons the person has and to prevent the destruction of any evidence on the person. According to the SITA doctrine, if an arrest is valid, officers may conduct a warrantless search of the arrestee and the area and objects in close proximity — i.e. the "grab area" — at about the same time as the arrest.

Officers may also perform inventory searches of the arrested person at the time of the arrest or upon arrival at the jail or other place of detention.

So, the police are allowed to search your clothing and your personal belongings after they've arrested you. They can also search any area nearby where you might conceal a weapon or hide evidence. If you are arrested inside a building, this usually means they can search the room they found you in but not the entire building. If you are arrested while driving, this means they can search inside the car, but not the trunk. But if they impound the car, then they can search the trunk as part of an inventory search. This is another example of the way that multiple exceptions to the warrant requirement can combine to allow the police a lot of leeway to search without going to a judge first.

When searches are delayed until some time after the arrest, courts generally have allowed warrantless searches of the person, including containers the arrestee carries, while rejecting searches of possessions that were within an arrestee's control. These no longer present any danger to the officer or risk of destruction because the arrestee is now in custody.

The question remains whether the SITA doctrine authorizes warrantless searches of the data on cell phones and computers carried by or located near the arrestee. There are very few cases addressing this question. In one case in Kansas, for example, the arresting officer downloaded the memory from the arrestee's cellphone for subsequent search. The court found that this seizure did not violate the Fourth Amendment because the officer only downloaded the dialed and incoming numbers, and because it was imperative to preserve the evidence given the volatile, easily destroyed, nature of cell phone memory.

In contrast, in another case in California, the court held that a cellphone search was not justified by the SITA doctrine because it was conducted for investigatory reasons rather than out of a concern for officer safety, or to prevent the concealment or destruction of evidence. The officers could seize the phone, and then go obtain a warrant to do any searching of it. The decision rejected the idea that the data searched was not private, in light of the nature and amount of information usually stored on cell phones and laptops.

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