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“Hi, uh, Mr. Landlord? This is Jane from apartment 14-D. I’m… ah… going to need to break our lease agreement and move out… like, tonight…”
So, if the client didn’t kick in his own door in his haste, there wouldn’t have been probable cause to enter the house.
And, if he had hid his backpack in the room then gone back to the foyer, he might have been arrested but the money not seized – not counting obtaining a search warrant for later.
The warrant would have been a slam dunk down the road (in that case, the fact that it WAS his house would have assisted; he would naturally be willing to hide evidence there) but yes, that’s about right.
A surprising number of 4A cases are due to policemen being too impatient to get what would have been an easily granted warrant.
Read: “We don’t care about good-faith.” Obviously if a cop has good reason to think someone is in trouble he should try to help them, but allowing them to collect evidence of unrelated things is just inviting bad-faith “emergency responses” as a pretext to enable searches.
There’s very little point in even having a warrant requirement if cops can get around it simply by pretending they heard a woman screaming, or gunfire, or whatever, and just barge right in.