WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether to allow police in Los Angeles to inspect hotel and motel guest registries without permission from a judge.
Dozens of cities, including Atlanta, Denver and Seattle, allow such searches, which law enforcement officials say help them catch fugitives and fight prostitution and drug dealing.
A group of motel owners challenged the law. The owners said they were not troubled by its requirement that they keep records about their guests but objected to a second part of the ordinance, requiring that the records "be made available to any officer of the Los Angeles Police Department for inspection."
The city said this means the police may look at the records at any time without the owners' consent or a search warrant.
In December, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco struck down the Los Angeles ordinance, saying it ran afoul of the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches. The vote was 7-4.
Judge Paul Watford, writing for the majority, said that hotel guests had given up their right to privacy when they provided information to the hotels. But he also wrote that hotel owners were protected by the Fourth Amendment.
"Businesses do not ordinarily disclose, and are not expected to disclose, the kind of commercially sensitive information contained in the records," he wrote, noting that they can include "customer lists, pricing practices, and occupancy rates."
Watford said that meant there must be some judicial involvement in the process.
"The Supreme Court has made clear that, to be reasonable, an administrative record-inspection scheme need not require issuance of a search warrant," he wrote, "but it must at a minimum afford an opportunity for pre-compliance judicial review."
But the Los Angeles law, he said, makes hotel owners guilty of a misdemeanor as soon as they refuse to comply with a police request to see their records.
In urging the justices to hear their appeal in the case, Los Angeles v. Patel, No. 13-1175, the city's lawyers said the law was an important tool to regulate "parking-meter motels" that can serve as magnets for crime. They added that immediate access to guest registries could be vital in the aftermath of a terrorist attack.
In response, the motel owners told the justices that some level of judicial involvement was required by the Constitution and would not lead to excessive delays or the loss of evidence in the meantime, as the owners were not challenging the record-keeping part of the ordinance.
"There is no evidence that the books are being cooked," the owners said, adding that the city "cannot explain why it even needs the ability to search without a warrant."
The city called the response empty rhetoric from motel owners who "are either hopelessly naive or darkly misleading this court." The owners' brief, the city said, "falsely and cynically assumes the operators of these parking-meter motels are honest people who follow the rules so the immutable records always will be available for inspection."
"There is no doubt," the city's brief said that "the city's loss of surprise guest-register inspections has had an immediate and dangerous impact on the decent people who live and work around these motels and these communities as a whole."
A Section on 10/21/2014