If a police officer asks you to unlock your phone, what should you do? Are you obligated to go ahead and do as they say, giving them access to all the information stored on your phone? Or you can point-blank refuse?
If the police don’t have a warrant, then you can just refuse to even hand it over. If you refuse, the officers might not do anything. They might know they have no real grounds to request a warrant and were just asking on the off chance you said yes. They know phones contain a lot of information, and might just have been hoping that a quick look through your phone would give them a lead.
Alternatively, they might go away and request a warrant. It won’t happen instantaneously, but they may well come back with it the same day or the next day.
What if they have a warrant?
The legal situation is currently unclear on your obligations if officers have a warrant.. If the officer asking you has a correctly filled out and signed search warrant to search your phone, then some courts have ruled you need to go ahead and unlock it for them, while others have ruled you don’t.
What will they do if you refuse?
If you don’t unlock it, one thing the police might consider doing is pushing your finger against the biometric scanner that unlocks it. You might assume this is a breach of your Constitutional rights, but in 2024, the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit surprised many by ruling that it was OK for the police to have done this in one particular case. They rejected the defense team’s argument that the evidence gained should be suppressed. It remains to be seen how other courts will rule in future cases should other officers think it worth a try.
It’s important to remember that the police can likely get most of the information on your phone by other means, anyway. They could ask a court to subpoena your phone provider, or companies such as Meta and Google, whose sites you were active on. So, without even touching your phone, police officers may be able to see much of your activity on it.
If you are facing charges due to information found on your phone, investigating your options for challenging how the police obtained it could be crucial.