Today many security personnel are “private police,” yet Fourth Amendment protect

The Fourth Amendment, like all the protections of the Bill of Rights, was originally conceived as a limitation on the powers of the newly created national government. Under the original conception of the Bill of Rights, citizens seeking legal protection against actions of state and local governments had to look to their state constitutions and state courts for relief.

However, the protection of the Fourth Amendment, along with most of the protections contained in the Bill of Rights, has been extended to defendants in state criminal prosecutions on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment’s limitations on state action. In 1949 the Supreme Court held that the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures is “implicit in ‘the concept of ordered liberty’ and as such enforceable against the States through the Due Process Clause [of the Fourteenth Amendment].”

The judicial extension of the Fourth Amendment and other protections of the Bill of Rights to limit the actions of the state and local governments are referred to as the doctrine of incorporation. Under this doctrine, provisions of the Bill of Rights deemed to be essential to a scheme of ordered liberty are incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment’s broad limitations on state and local authority.