Florida Police Obtain Warrant to Search ‘All Persons’ in Apartment Complex

For months, Sarasota police officers watched drug dealers openly sell crack cocaine and marijuana from a vacant lot behind the Mediterranean Apartments in Newtown. Officers tried to arrest dealers, but suspects often fled and managed to disappear into the neighborhood. The pressure to make arrests peaked in July 2009, when a man's mutilated body was found in one of the apartment units. So that December, the agency tried something it had never done before. It sought permission from a judge to search anyone and everyone who parked or set foot in the apartment complex parking lot. More than a dozen...