It&#x27;s completely legal for the police to make note of who enters a public storefront.  It&#x27;s also legal for the police to dig through your trash.  Once it&#x27;s placed on the curb to be picked up it&#x27;s not your trash anymore, it&#x27;s the city or county&#x27;s trash, and they can do with it as they like.<p>Evidence of illegal contraband in trash is almost by definition probable cause for a search warrant, and judges tend to be okay with handing out a few false positive warrants.  Assuming that the police are professional and the citizens are cooperative, the damage is usually relatively minor.<p>This seems to be less a case of rules failing and more a case of common sense breaking down.  Wasting an officer&#x27;s time someone&#x27;s trash because you once saw them leave a gardening store isn&#x27;t illegal, it&#x27;s just a dumb waste of resources.  And serving the resulting search warrant with a SWAT team is the kind of risk-averse cover-your-ass common sense violation that legal remedies tend to make worse instead of better.