What liabilities do the police/CPS have if you are found innocent? Being accused of a crime you did not commit is an expensive problem. The police may kick your door in and ransack your house looking for evidence. They may deprive you of your property (phones, computers, vehicles, etc.) for months or years. You may have to pay for legal representation. You might be locked up in remand for a very long time (UK justice is extremely slow). You may lose your job. In the event that you are eventually found innocent, what liabilities can you make claims against? Do the police have you pay to fix your front door? If they took a year to analyse a mobile phone, can you claim due to the excessive amount of time it took? What if the device is returned broken or wiped? If your legal team and expert witnesses cost you £1,000,000, can you recover some or all of that cost from the CPS? What if your job has been filled by someone else and you can't get it back?
Do the police have to pay to fix your front door? If they took a year to analyse a mobile phone, can you claim due to the excessive amount of time it took? What if the device is returned broken, or wiped? What court costs can you recover? Can you recover loss of income? You've asked a few questions; I'll attempt to deal with them all, and I'll refer to each item as I do so. Damage to property This could apply to damage to property (items 1 and 3, which are more or less the same thing). The answer? The police may pay damages. Here's a recent example from 2008: Police in Britain paid out more than half a million pounds last year to repair doors, ceilings and even mantelpiece ornaments smashed in raids that were based on wrong information. ... The Home Office said that compensation policy was decided at force level but most police authorities draw tight legal lines round repayments. A spokesman for the Gwent force said: "The critical factor is simply whether forced entry is legal, proportionate and reasonable given the circumstances." Items seized as evidence In general, you are not entitled to compensation for an item that is seized for an extended duration of time (2). The Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984) ("PACE") states: (1) Subject to subsection (4) below, anything which has been seized by a constable or taken away by a constable following a requirement made by virtue of section 19 or 20 above may be retained so long as is necessary in all the circumstances. (4) Nothing may be retained for either of the purposes mentioned in subsection (2)(a) above if a photograph or copy would be sufficient for that purpose. If it's just the data on your phone they want, then they would be required by PACE to copy it and then return the device. Legal costs A successful defendant (4) is entitled to compensation in some cases, including costs incurred for expert witnesses. Schedule 7, para. 3 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 inserts additional provisions to the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985: (3)Condition A is that the accused is an individual and the order is made under— (a)section 16(1), (b)section 16(3), or (c)section 16(4)(a)(ii) or (iii) or (d). (4)Condition B is that the accused is an individual and the legal costs were incurred in proceedings in a court below which were— (a)proceedings in a magistrates’ court, or (b)proceedings on an appeal to the Crown Court under section 108 of the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980 (right of appeal against conviction or sentence). (5)Condition C is that the legal costs were incurred in proceedings in the Supreme Court. (10)In this section— “legal costs” means fees, charges, disbursements and other amounts payable in respect of advocacy services or litigation services including, in particular, expert witness costs; “advocacy services” means any services which it would be reasonable to expect a person who is exercising, or contemplating exercising, a right of audience in relation to any proceedings, or contemplated proceedings, to provide; “expert witness costs” means amounts payable in respect of the services of an expert witness, including amounts payable in connection with attendance by the witness at court or elsewhere; “litigation services” means any services which it would be reasonable to expect a person who is exercising, or contemplating exercising, a right to conduct litigation in relation to proceedings, or contemplated proceedings, to provide.” Basically, you can include the legal costs noted above: where the accused is an individual and the order is made under section 16(1), 16(3), or section 16(4)(a)(ii) or (iii) or (d) of the POA; where the accused is an individual and the legal costs were incurred in proceedings in a court below, which were either proceedings in a Magistrates Court, or proceedings on appeal to the Crown Court under Section 108 of the Magistrates' Court Act 1980 (right of appeal against conviction or sentence); or where the legal costs were incurred in proceedings in the Supreme Court; where the accused is an individual and the legal costs were incurred in relevant Crown court proceedings, as defined in POA s6A(11), and the Director of Legal Aid Casework has made a determination of financial ineligibility in relation to the accused and those proceedings (POA s16A(5A)). Compensation for loss of employment Loss of a job in and of itself is not generally grounds for compensation. What if you were arrested for some highly sought-after skill - say, computer vulnerability testing - and were acquitted by means of an affirmative defense? You might end up with a job that pays more. You are not entitled to any statutory relief. But, let's say it's something unflattering, and the police continued to broadcast your arrest and charges even though they were aware it was false. There's precedent for aggravated damages, as per Patel v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2015] EWCA Civ 645. In this case, the Claimant was stopped and searched upon entry to the UK. After being denied entry, the Claimant appealed the decision... the primary judge found that the immigration officers had falsified information pertaining to the Claimant's suitability to enter. Although this was appealed, I haven't been able to find the subsequent ruling; it's possible it was settled outside of court. However, this shows that judgement can - and has - been made against a defendant who causes pecuniary loss through malicious and contumelious conduct. I think I've covered everything, but it's hard to be sure. Consider your question into several separate questions in future :)
It obviously varies by jurisdiction, but most jurisdictions I am familiar with have something like a "Statute of Limitations" where crimes cannot be prosecuted after a certain length of time because it was "too long ago". The logic is firstly that if you prosecute a pensioner for stealing a bottle of beer from a shop when they were 18, the person you are prosecuting is very different from the person that committed the crime. Secondly, it is very hard to obtain a fair trial after the passing of a long period of time. As far as I know, all jurisdictions vary the length of time depending on the severity of the crime, and the most serious crimes are never time-limited. Rape usually falls into the category of "never time-limited". Of course, although murder and rape can be prosecuted after 15+ years, the difficulty of obtaining a fair trial, and of producing evidence from that long ago, means that they may not be. Finally note that "prosecution" of the accused is often not the primary aim of accusers. They just want to say "this was wrong". Abused individuals often find it very hard to speak out about the abuse; the current scandals have made it that bit easier, by reassuring them that it isn't just them (see the #metoo campaign for example).
Most leases have a provision allowing a landlord to make entry without notice in an emergency, but the better course of action, as noted in a comment by @BlueDogRanch, is to call the police and ask them to make a &quot;welfare check.&quot; You would ordinarily be permitted to cooperate with police by unlocking doors in furtherance of their welfare check. The police are trained to do this properly in a way that properly balances the need to aid someone who is sick or ill, the need to preserve evidence if there was a death or crime that needs to be understood legally, and to protect the legitimate privacy interests of the tenant. You are not. You could incur liability for failing to prevent death or aggravating injury, could be wrongfully implicated if physical evidence from you contaminates the scene or you destroy evidence showing the true cause, and could be sued for invading the tenant's privacy if it was found that you entry was unreasonable and that it wasn't really an emergency, which is always easier to conclude with 20/20 hindsight. As it is, your biggest potential source of liability is delaying in calling the police seeking a welfare check. They often respond quite quickly to these by the way, although it is not the very highest priority for law enforcement.
The General Rule In practice, the only time when self-defense against a police officer is legal is when you do not know and have no reasonable way that you could have known that the person attacking you is a police officer. (And arguably, a police officer acting in an official capacity in furtherance of his or her duties, rather than in a personal capacity as an individual.) For example, if the police do a no knock raid in the dark of night, and don't announce themselves, and you shoot police officers reasonably believing them to be home invasion burglars, you would not have criminal or civil liability for doing so. A similar valid self-defense claim might arise when someone has an objectively reasonable reason to think that someone claiming to be a police officer is really just a criminal impersonating a police officer, even if that belief is, in fact, mistaken. In almost all other circumstances, you need to submit to the officers, and you are pretty much required by law to bear the risk that excessive force by the officer will harm you. If you don't, you will probably be guilty of the crime of resisting arrest and will not be entitled to a self-defense defense. The fact that you are not actually guilty of a crime is irrelevant. This is often the case and police officers are not omniscient. If the officer lacked probable cause for an arrest (which there is often no way that the person being arrested or attacked can know at the time), the remedy is a civil rights suit after the fact, not self-defense. In theory, there might be other isolated circumstances where self-defense against a police officer is legal, but they involve fact patterns so quirky that they would almost never happen in real life, or would almost never be possible to prove in a manner that the courts would believe. Officer Liability For Harming Someone Legitimately Acting In Self Defense Whether the officers had civil liability to you if you were harmed by the officers while exercising your right to self-defense would depend upon their state of mind, even if you were rightfully using self-defense. For example, a U.S. Supreme Court case decided in January of 2017 (White v. Pauly) involved this fact pattern. In White v. Pauly an officer arrived late on the scene and had no reason to believe that the officers who arrived there before him and were being shot at by citizens in a house that they were approaching, lacked probable cause, or had not announced themselves. The court held that as a result, he had no civil liability to a citizen he shot, even if the person who the late arriving officer shot while that citizen was shooting back at the police officers on the scene was actually engaging in good faith self-defense. The citizen's self-defense in the case had a valid defense to criminal or civil liability for firing on the officers, because the citizen shooting back didn't actually know that the people approaching his house were police officers. But, because the late arriving officer reasonably believed under the circumstances that the citizen had no right to engage in self-defense, because he thought that the early arriving officers had probable cause and had announced themselves, the late arriving officer had no civil liability to the citizens he shot.
It will be fact-specific, but potentially not unlocking your phone for such a reason could be a &quot;reasonable excuse&quot;. However, you will need to provide evidence for such an excuse. The prosecution will still have to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that the excuse is not &quot;reasonable&quot;. It is entirely possible that the court would determine any such excuse based on privacy to not be reasonable, partly because it grants a very broad shield to defendants which would frustrate the purpose of the law, but partly because they can point to precedent that privacy is not an absolute right and that privacy infringement can be justified in the circumstances (the same way the police can search your phone). I have not been able to find any relevant case law on the matter, but I will keep investigating and update my answer if I find any. As an aside, it does appear possible for any warrant obtained by TV Licensing officials to include a Section 49 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 notice which would compel you to unlock the phone regardless of any &quot;reasonable excuse&quot;. Failure to do so would result in a conviction under Section 53 of the Act.
Fraud new-south-wales There are a number of offences that fall under the broad category of fraud. The most relevant for this type of behaviour is in s192E of the Crimes Act 1900: &quot;Obtain financial advantage or cause financial advantage by deception&quot; which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years. In order to understand what the prosecution needs to prove beyond reasonable doubt it is useful to look at the suggested jury direction from the Criminal Bench Book (a crib sheet for judges): [The accused] is charged that [he/she] by a deception dishonestly [obtained a financial advantage for himself/herself] or [kept a financial advantage that he/she had]. The Crown contends that the financial advantage is [set out the financial advantage]. It does not matter whether the financial advantage alleged was permanent or temporary. The deception that the Crown alleges that the accused perpetrated was [set out the deception]. It must prove beyond reasonable doubt that the financial advantage was obtained as a result of that deception and that the accused perpetrated that deception intentionally to obtain the financial advantage or acted recklessly in that regard. Here reckless means foreseeing the possibility that as a result of the deception [he/she] would [obtain a financial advantage] or [retain the financial advantage that he/she had] and carrying on with the deception notwithstanding that possibility. However, the Crown does not need to prove a particular person was deceived. The Crown must prove beyond reasonable doubt that the accused acted dishonestly in [his/her] deceptive conduct. Dishonest in this context means that the accused acted dishonestly according to the standards of ordinary people. You as ordinary members of the community determine what is dishonest conduct in this regard. You must not only find beyond reasonable doubt that the accused acted dishonestly in deceiving [the victim] but also that [he/she] knew that [his/her] conduct was dishonest according to the standards of ordinary people. It is not enough that a person is shithouse at delivering on their contractual obligations: even repeatedly so. That just makes them a bad business person, not a criminal. They must have acted dishonestly and deceived their victims from the get-go with the intention of not fulfilling their bargain or have been reckless as to their ability to do so. If you believe that you have knowledge of criminal fraud, you should report it to the police who have the discretion to investigate and prosecute. As a general rule, police devote fewer resources to non-violent crime than they do to violent crime and less to crimes where the victim has handed over property/money than those where it was taken from them involuntarily so fraud tends to be lower on their radar.
Anyone can be arrested, as long as the police (and in some cases, anyone) have probable cause to do so. This generally includes two points: You are in the process of committing a criminal act The police have probable cause, generally through evidence, that you are in the process of, about to, or have committed a criminal act. This usually requires obtaining a warrant for the arrest. However, it's important not to conflate searches with arrest. Arrests are when you are being taken into custody for the reasons mentioned above. Searches are when your personal belongings (i.e. property), are searched to collect evidence. It is not up to police to convict someone. This is the job of the judicial system. There's a bit of terminology here: convictions basically mean being found guilty of an offence. Police don't have the ability to convict someone of an offence. They do have the ability to arrest, and charge with an offence. To charge someone with a crime basically means to accuse them of having done something. Now let's get to the actual crime. Since you haven't mentioned a specific jurisdiction, I'm going to use Canadian cases and law, but in general, it should apply worldwide. If the police have reason to believe that you are engaging in unlawful hacking-related behaviour, then they have the authority to arrest you. They simply need to have a reasonable belief that you are engaged in the crime. Something such as connecting you with an IP address and connecting that you were online at the time is enough. If the police need to find out more information (which they generally do, to investigate further into the matter) - they can obtain a search warrant afterwards. With this, they can legally search into your computer, and investigate. Any evidence that they collect can be used in court. I've recently done some research into cyber crimes. One rather infamous case involved the attack on multiple large scale websites, including Dell, Yahoo, and Amazon, in 2000. This sparked a large scale investigations, between the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and the FBI. The attacks were claimed by some to cause nearly 1.7 billion dollars of damage. The hacker was charged with 58 different offences. You can imply from the linked article that he was arrested before his computer was searched.
The problem with Solution 2 is that government officials in the United States enjoy qualified immunity with respect to actions that they did while acting under color of law. It's not total immunity, but if they do things by the book, they cannot be prosecuted even if something goes wrong (even when doing things by the book, Police deal in very volatile situations and things can still go wrong because of an X factor to specific for the training manual to cover.). In other cases, it may be because multiple officers are working the scene and Office A lied to Officer B about the situation. Consider Officer A pulls over a suspect and realizes it was someone who was suspected of a crime, but couldn't prove it. He calls for back up and Officer B arrives. Upon arriving on scene, Officer A tells B to search the trunk of the car despite the fact that A had not received consent from the suspect nor has a warrant, nor cause to make a search of a trunk of a vehicle. B makes the search and finds [the bloody knife/the stash of drugs/the smoking gun/the match to a child's shoe that was missing from the kidnapping scene/ insert other incriminating evidence]. Under system (2), since it was Officer B who made the illegal search, B would be liable for it, even though Officer A lied about having legal reason for a search of the trunk space. But what's more... if the evidence is gonna be used anyway, what's to stop the cops doing it again? After all, there is very little recourse for those who are illegally searched to contest this in court (If I'm illegally searched and don't have anything on me, I have to take this to civil court, which is a different animal than Criminal Court and exposes me to broader Discovery... aka gives the cops free reign to search my property for a hell of a lot more illegal things.) or just sit back and count my 4th amendment rights (the section of the constitution protecting against unwarranted search and seizures) as worth less than the paper they're printed on. Oh, and by the way... that second word seizure... that means that they will be taking my property (or myself if they arrest me) and will not be giving it back for some time while they process it... if it's a legal to hold item (like my laptop that I do work on) that's going to make it harder for me to do my job which injures me further in lost business and income. In other cases, it could be they have a warrant for a large item (a stolen big screen tv) and while searching for it, open my sugar bowel and find evidence of a crime unrelated to theft of the television (i.e. opening a baggie of weed). This is actually an illegal search because, unless I am a wizard, a Time Lord, or Mary Poppins, there is no reason why a container smaller than a big screen TV should ever be searched when looking for a Big Screen TV and the cops should logically see this as out of bounds of the search warrant. The nature of this is damaging before the legality of the search can be determined, and because the search may have been out of scope of the warrant that was otherwise justified, the rule of making the evidence of a crime inadmissible was held in order to prevent LEOs from doing this because they could. This rule also started to take formation prior to the Revolutionary War. British Law had ruled against compelled confessions being inadmissible as evidence in 1769, a full six years before the Revolutionary war started (1775) and seven years before the publication of the Declaration of Independence (1776). Now there are some exceptions that can get the evidence brought back in, such as plain view (&quot;The suspect's vehicle is a pick up truck with an open bed, the murder weapon was lying in the bed covered in blood&quot;), inevitable discovery (&quot;We have developed evidence by other means that would have lead us to this evidence legally&quot;) and Exigent Circumstances (&quot;We believed someone inside the property was in grave danger if we did not enter the property immediately and that's when we found a cache of stolen Big Screen TVs!) and Good Faith (the Warrant was authorized for the wrong street address of the target but we found the evidence of an unrelated crime in a place the warrant authorized us to search. Everything but the goofed up address was done by the book.).