Virginia cops barged into a Black woman’s home, shoving her aside when she demanded to see a warrant, telling her they did not need a search warrant to arrest her estranged husband for missing a court date.
“The guy pushed me out the way,” Trice Riddick said in an interview with Atlanta Black Star after posting the video on Instagram, where it has gone viral. “He said, ‘We ain’t got to show you sh-t.’ And ran up in my house, guns out.”
Portsmouth police entered her home on Sept. 22 to arrest Edward Riddick for missing court over a parole violation, searching her home for about an hour before finding him hiding in a small space inside a closet.
They told her they had an arrest warrant that listed her address on it — not an actual search warrant — but Riddick said she had kicked him out of the house three weeks earlier and had yet to see the actual arrest warrant with her address listed on it.
“He doesn’t live here. He just happened to come over that day and asked for a ride,” Riddick said. “I didn’t care if he got arrested. I told him he needed to turn himself in weeks before.”
Her main beef with the cops is that they told her they had spotted him on the street but waited to arrest him inside her home because they needed to assemble a team of cops.
“Y’all don’t need no team for no 150-pound —he probably 90-pound soaking wet,” she said. “Why y’all needed 20 officers to arrest one skinny-ass man for?”
Riddick sent video showing her estranged husband running up the stairs after the cops began banging on the door.
“You have an arrest warrant for Ed, but you don’t have a warrant to come in my house,” Riddick tells the cops through the closed front door.
The video shows her walking up the stairs to find him, then back down to say she couldn’t find him, and opening the front door after the cops threatened to break it down.
“Ma’am, you have to step out,” a cop tells her.
“You have to show me a warrant,” she responds.
But the officers push past her and head upstairs, apparently because they saw Edward Riddick run upstairs and decided not to search downstairs.
One officer tells her they have an arrest warrant listing her address, but no officer shows her the warrant in the footage Atlanta Black Star reviewed. The officer, who appears to supervise the others, also repeatedly tells her they followed Edward Riddick to her house.
“If you seen him come in the house, then that means you seen him walking to the house,” she said. “Why didn’t you arrest him on the street?”
About an hour later, they found him hiding in a small space in the closet and walked him downstairs in handcuffs.
He remains incarcerated on a parole violation that appears to stem from a 2012 conviction for cocaine distribution, online court records show.
“I still to this day have not seen a warrant,” she said.
Riddick, who posted the video to Instagram about a month later in October to raise awareness, says she had been trying to find an attorney to file a lawsuit but has had no luck.
“I definitely want to hold these officers accountable for what they did,” she said.
Whether the entry was lawful remains unresolved. In United States v. Brinkley, the Fourth Circuit, whose jurisdiction includes Virginia, held that officers entering a home under an arrest warrant alone must have probable cause to believe the wanted person resides there and is inside.
Entering a third party’s home generally requires a search warrant unless officers have consent or exigent circumstances justify entry.
Riddick said she had put her husband out three weeks earlier. She has not established what information officers had about his residency before they entered.
Although he seemingly no longer lived there, Riddick said he returned that morning to ask for a ride to a medical appointment. While waiting, he walked to a convenience store and called her to say he had seen officers nearby, she said.
She said he later returned to the house and fell asleep on the living room couch, and the cops began banging on the door about 30 minutes later.
“Y’all seen him on the street and y’all waited till he came up in the house to come harass me and y’all don’t even have a warrant,” she said.
“This has caused me so much mental anguish. I feel weak. I feel violated.”
“It makes you feel like not even safe in your own home. And that’s where you’re supposed to be safe at,” she added.
