EDITORIAL: No social worker exception to the Bill of Rights

Open records laws tend to breed bureaucratic arrogance — Nevada taxpayers may by now be familiar with state and local agencies attempting to avoid rules designed to promote transparency and accountability. But the hubris too often extends even to constitutional protections.

Consider a recent Fourth Amendment case out of Pennsylvania highlighted by UCLA legal scholar Eugene Volokh.

In 2019, officials with Philadelphia child protective services received an anonymous complaint alleging neglect by a mother of two children. The source provided the home address of the family, and a case worker eventually came knocking. When the father answered the door, however, he refused entry to the caseworker and called the mother on the phone. When the mother arrived, she, too, refused to allow the government worker into the home absent a court order.

The agency responded by asking a court to essentially grant it carte blanche to enter the residence, even though its only evidence of wrongdoing was a dubious anonymous allegation. Lawyers for the city argued in court filings that social service agencies “should not be hampered from performing their duties because they have not satisfied search and seizure jurisprudence developed in the context of purely criminal law.”

This is dangerous claptrap.

The Fourth Amendment demands that the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause.” Conspicuously absent from that succinct directive is a clause creating an exception for government social workers — or any other public employee.

Thankfully, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court emphatically agreed.

“The Fourth Amendment case law has been developed in a myriad of situations involving very serious threats to individuals and society,” the majority opinion held, “and we find no suggestion there that the governing principles should vary depending on the court’s assessment of the gravity of the societal risk involved.”

In addition, the opinion continued, “The Fourth Amendment applies equally whether the government official is a police officer conducting a criminal investigation or a caseworker conducting a civil child welfare investigation.”

The ruling is sound and reinvigorates one of our most cherished and important rights. But the fact that attorneys for the city of Philadelphia — who presumably were subjected to some version of constitutional law instruction during their years of higher education — felt comfortable arguing that the Bill of Rights shouldn’t apply to social workers is a stark reminder of why eternal vigilance is imperative in the war against tyranny.