Dan Epps

But it's actually a 20-year-old decision.

So very, very, very early Roberts Court decision that laid out that standard.

So basically, if the police in that case, like the police see like people beating each other up

inside a home and like somebody's injured they can go in okay they don't need to go like call up a magistrate and get a warrant and say like can we go in because there's people like bleeding inside so does the emergency need to be a crime like beating people up as a crime no okay no it can someone like could be dying okay right someone could be injured because dying is not a crime and yeah and this is sort of tied up with something that the court had talked about at one point as like

uh, community caretaking.

And then a lot of lower courts had like taken that, that label and run with it and basically said, there's this like free, free ranging exception where like, if the police are doing something that isn't investigative, they can kind of do a lot of things they wouldn't otherwise be able to do.

The courts in, uh, Coniglia versus Strom said, no, no, no, that's not the right way to think about it.

There's an emergency aid doctrine.

There's not this like big amorphous community caretaking doctrine where police can just like

go inside people's houses for other reasons.

So we're not going to question the scope of that doctrine.

That doctrine exists.

That doctrine is neither going to be contracted nor expanded in this case, I think.

And so the only question is, what did that older case, Brigham City, mean when it said objectively reasonable basis for believing?

Okay.

Right?

Like what threshold, what quantum of evidence is it

Like, so Fourth Amendment law uses different thresholds, right, to conduct a tarry stop or like a brief investigative stop of a person.

Police need only reasonable suspicion.

And then to actually effectuate an arrest, they need probable cause, right?