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DC Dorm Room Searches

At DC universities, those students who live in on-campus housing, including dorm rooms, have no right to expect privacy. Campus police and other campus officials are allowed to enter your dorm room without any advance notice. An individual who is suspected of a crime or has been charged with a crime following a search of their dorm room should contact a DC student defense lawyer right away to begin building a defense.

When & Why Dorm Room Searches Occur

Students should understand that when they sign an agreement with the university to live in campus housing, as an example, in a dorm room, they provide the university with the ability to search their dorm room and any content or any containers in the dorm room without notice and without probable cause or even any suspicion of wrongdoing. Students who live in on-campus housing have no expectation of privacy in their dorm room. That means that campus police can conduct no-notice searches and university administrators or resident advisors can enter dorm rooms without advanced warning.

Typically, that doesn’t happen. In most situations, campus police or resident advisors wait to receive a tip that there might be some contraband in a student’s dorm room, or they search a dorm room based on the smell of contraband. In some situations, campus police or student resident advisors can enter dorm rooms if they hear a great deal of noise coming from a student’s dorm room or if they believe there might be some kind of altercation.

When they search the dorm room, campus police or any campus authority can look for drugs, drug paraphernalia, alcohol, or any other evidence of contraband that is a violation of the student code of conduct.

It is rare for local law enforcement to conduct searches of student dorms. Typically, when a student dorm is being searched, it would usually be conducted by campus police often in conjunction with university administrators or a student resident advisor.

Charges That Accompany Dorm Room Searches

Most frequently, student dorm rooms are searched when there is some allegation or some suspicion that the student may have drugs, drug paraphernalia, or drug related contraband in their dorm room. Very often, dorm room searches are conducted when a dorm resident advisor or a campus police smell as the odor of marijuana or some other drug-related odor coming from a student’s room. Campus police often also search dorm rooms if there is a suspicion or information that drug distribution might be taking place in a student’s dorm room.

Probable Cause

When police officers need or want to search your apartment, they can’t say they are going to come into your apartment because they heard that there may be some contraband there. They need to gather evidence and apply to a judge for a search warrant. Search warrants need to contain probable cause as to why the police believe there is illegal activity going on inside the home.

The probable cause can include information from a reliable informant. It can include any witnesses, or any witness information that a police officer gathered. The probable cause would have to include some kind of tangible information or evidence that would lead a judge to believe that there is probable cause that a crime is being committed inside the house

In contrast, campus police do not need to apply for any arrest warrant and do not need to show probable cause to search a dorm room. Campus police can search a dorm room for any reason or no reason and they can do so completely at random. There is no oversight as to when or how or why campus police search dorm rooms. Students have very few rights when it comes to searches of on-campus housing.

Nonetheless, campus police typically don’t make it their business to go around searching random dorm rooms at all hours, for no reason. They usually wait until they have some suspicion that there might be contraband inside a student’s dorm room. However, that suspicion does not need to rise to the level of probable cause and it doesn’t need to even be limited to a specific room. As an example, if campus police smell the odor of some kind of drug on a university floor, campus police can then search every single room on that floor to see if they turn up contraband. Their searches can be much broader and do not need to be based on the same kind of specific evidence that an application for an arrest warrant or a search warrant needed for a criminal case.

Student Rights During Dorm Room Searches

For the most part, students who live in on-campus housing have very few privacy rights when it comes to their dorm rooms and any belongings that they might have in their dorm rooms. When a student signs an agreement to live in on-campus housing, the student’s dorm lease or rental contract most likely includes provisions granting the university access to dorm rooms for searches, maintenance or any other purpose that the university may deem appropriate. Furthermore, those searches can be conducted without advance notice and without the consent of the resident. The university’s position is typically that they own the dorm room and students or residents occupy those rooms at the pleasure of the university. So the university retains the ability to search those dorm rooms because the students are not considered to have any privacy rights in the dorms.

Where Is It Stated That Students Have No Privacy Rights?

Provisions regarding privacy are part of the contracts that students sign with the university for on-campus housing. It is important to read those contracts and fully understand the provisions that discuss what privacy rights the students have. In most circumstances, those contracts will let the students know that their dorm rooms can be subject to random searches by the campus police or university administrators without notice, consent or the presence of the occupants of the room.