Can I Do Warrant Searches on Police Officers?

There are a lot of people in this world that could have warrants that you wouldn’t even consider. Could police officers be a group of people that could have warrants out for their arrest? One way that people would figure this out is by doing some warrant searches.

But, would a warrant search on a police officer even work? It would make sense why it might not, but police are still just people like anyone else. So, what kind of information could you find out about a police officer by doing one of these searches?

This is one of the less common questions that we get asked, but we get asked it enough that we figured that it would be worth looking into so we could answer the question for you and to satisfy our own curiosity on the matter. 

This definitely wasn’t an easy thing to look into. Just try Googling “can a police officer have a warrant out for their arrest.” and you’ll see what we mean. After a lot of hard work and research, we were able to find some suitable answers for you. With any hope, we’ll be able to put this question to bed once and for all by the time this article is over. 

What is a Warrant?

Here’s where we have to start. There are a lot of things that have to come together in order to determine if a police officer can have a warrant, and if so if you’d be able to search it. So, let’s just make sure that we all understand what a warrant is so we can move on to the next thing.

So, what is a warrant? Well, the shortest way to answer this is to say that a warrant is an order that is signed by a judge, magistrate, or other authorized body in some cases, to search or seize someone or their property. This is important because of the broad protections offered by the 4th amendment. 

Warrants are usually issued when a crime has been committed and the suspect was able to flee before police arrived at the scene. All manner of crimes ranging from having unpaid parking tickets to murder can have a warrant put out for it. 

Once a warrant is out, in most states any police officer is able to execute the warrant at any time. Some states make warrants automatically executable by any police officer anywhere in the state, while others are specific to a county or several counties. 

These rules change a lot from state to state, which can make things confusing if you’re trying to figure out how they work in every state. That being said, there are a lot of things that have to be the same across state lines. For example, every warrant has to have:

• The name of the suspect.
• Crimes that were committed.
• Signature of a judge or magistrate, in some states a mayor has this power.
• Date the warrant was issued.

There also always has to be a good reason for a warrant to be issued. A warrant does allow a cop to legally violate a person’s 4th amendment rights, so they have to be really careful about using that kind of power so innocent people aren’t bothered for no reason. 

Can a Warrant be Cleared?

Alright, here’s the next thing that we need to look at in order to figure out the answer to this question. Can warrants be cleared? The short answer is yes, but it really depends on the circumstances. There are only a few things that can cause a warrant to be cleared.

Some of these situations can be pretty rare, but some of them are far from uncommon. A warrant can be cleared if:

• The person in question is arrested.
• The person in question turns themself in.
• The person in question dies. 
• The person in question is cleared of suspicion before they’re taken in.
• Evidence appears that makes it so the warrant would be invalid. 

As you can tell, some of these are hail marys so in most cases the warrant won’t be cleared until the suspect is in law enforcement custody. Of course, you might get lucky and be cleared of suspicion before then, but the odds of that happening are pretty slim.

Can a Police Officer Have a Warrant?

Alright, here’s where we start getting into the more interesting stuff. We’ve been building up to this, so we definitely hope that you’re excited to get to the meat of this article. Could a police officer have a warrant out for their arrest?

Well, the short answer is yes. Police officers can commit crimes and flee the scene before anyone shows up just like anyone else. This will be our jumping-off point for this answer though because this is where things start to get a little complicated.

Do you remember in the last section when we went over how warrants are cleared? Well, that’s exactly why this gets so tricky. What do you think happens when a police officer has a warrant out for their arrest? 

There are only a few different scenarios that can come from this. In the first one, they show up to work and either turn themself in or get arrested by their coworkers. Then the warrant is cleared before much time has passed, meaning that the warrant would disappear pretty quickly. 

Assuming that everyone in this police department is on the up and up, this would be handled quietly and in house without trying to make much noise about it to the public as to not instill distrust in the police in the public. This is the ideal scenario.

In another scenario, the police officer would become aware of the warrant before work and decide that they don’t want to go to trial for whatever they’re wanted for. In this case, they’d probably be aware that their best chance would be to flee so they could avoid prosecution. 

Where would they flee? Who’s to say? Maybe they’ll flee from Rhode Island to Florida. Maybe they’ll flee to Latin America and disappear into a new country with a new name. The point is, they could try to run and might even be able to do so successfully. 

If they run, they’ll either be caught by law enforcement and have to go to court anyway, or they could end up countries away before anyone’s the wiser. It really depends on the police officer and how lucky they might be. They could even get caught up at the border, who knows. 

Regardless, unless the police officer is put into custody, their warrant will be active indefinitely.

Can You Search for a Police Officer’s Warrant?

Alright, now we close the article with the actual answer to the question we came here to answer. Can you search for a police officer’s warrant? Hopefully, we’ll be done with this question forever after this because it is a very complicated question. 

Theoretically, the answer is yes. Police officers are people, and that would mean that their warrant would be as available to anyone else, assuming that the warrant isn’t cleared before you get the chance to look at it. 

If the police officer turns themself in as soon as they’re aware of the warrant, you probably won’t get a chance to look at their warrant. Police officers have access to warrant databases that the public doesn’t, and their databases are updated in real-time, so this is possible.

If the police officer decides to flee could you look at their warrants? Well, the answer to this is a hard maybe. One would assume that their warrant information would be treated like everyone else’s because cops are just people with a job, It would be a fair assumption to make. 

That being said, it might not be so cut and dry. These assumptions are based on the thinking that warrants for police officers would be treated exactly the same as warrants for regular people. Do you think that they would treat these warrants the same though?

There is a chance that the police would treat warrants for police officers a little differently because, well, they are police. That might mean keeping the warrants off of public databases in hopes of keeping that information in-house. They might assume that the public would think less of the police if they saw one of the police with a warrant. 

The Final Verdict

We entered this article hoping to answer a question. Can you search for a police officer’s warrants, assuming they had any? After all of the information that we’ve gone over, you can probably make your own assumptions to test if you ever happen to know a cop you want to look into.

That being said, we think you probably couldn’t. More than likely the warrant would either be handled quickly or the police wouldn’t share the warrant with the public. That being said, you can still look into all sorts of other people’s warrants.