>> Eyewitnesses are generally pretty terrible at providing a true and accurate accounting of specific details in a sudden situation. For many reasons, informants can be misinformed, confused, incorrect, malicious.
> I'm aware of the inaccuracy of eyewitness testimony, but that's not relevant in this case. The tip came from a known confidential informant, not a random person.
Many informants provide information all the time about crimes. Accuracy and reliability of informant reporting is always an issue for police. Again, that's why they have procedures dictating how they have to verify information, etc.
The article says only "confidential informant," so you may have misread and assigned more value to the informant's report than you otherwise would have, which is understandable.
> Yes, this was bad police work
The issue here isn't "bad" police work as much as it's "warrant-less search and seizure." So, possibly illegal police work. They were quite competent and use tools that haven't necessarily been outlawed yet; when courts start outlawing stingrays, then its incompetence.
> Now for a thought experiment:
If I leave evidence at the scene of a crime, it's understood to be within the law for the police to collect it and analyze it. Fingerprints, body fluids, electronic devices, all fair game. I have no reasonable expectation of privacy if I've left stuff at a crime scene.
This is not that. This is if the police didn't need a warrant to enter your house and collect fingerprint/other samples, for the purpose of determining if you may have been involved in a crime in the past. That's a violation of your right of the people to be secure in your person, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.
In a similar way, the courts need to decide if it's also a violation when police, without a warrant, sett a wiretrap to spoof a cell phone tower with the intent of discovering a person's location or other personal information from a person's private electronic devices.
It's held to be the case that a wiretap cannot be placed without a warrant. It is reasonable to extend that logic to the automatic/unintentional/"unconscious" communication a person's cell phone does with the cellular network, to say nothing about using that stingray to capture actual explicit communications made by the person over that network.
I do get where you're coming from; I just don't agree that the argument you've laid out is sufficient to subjugate a constitutionally dictated right. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in the federal courts and in congress.