CA6: QI for workplace search of cell phone

Plaintiff is a police officer who sued over the workplace search of his cell phone (see City of Ontario v. Quon) after his wife grabbed it and turned it in claiming he was having sex with another officer. Qualified immunity was granted that the law was not clearly established. “Here, we need not address whether it was proper for the district court to apply O’Connor to assess Lazar’s claim through the workplace search frame. This is because Lazar fails to cite any ‘directly on point precedent’ that stands for the proposition that a government official-when presented with evidence of an employee’s potential workplace misconduct-violates that employee’s Fourth Amendment rights by conducting a search of the employee’s personal cell phone for further evidence of the workplace misconduct. [¶] In short, Lazar’s theory does not meet the ‘demanding standard’ of qualified immunity, which ‘protects “all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.”’ District of Columbia v. Wesby, 138 S. Ct. 577, 589 (2018) (quoting Malley v. Briggs, 475 U.S. 335, 341 (1986)).” Lazar v. Knight, 2020 U.S. App. LEXIS 31868 (6th Cir. Oct. 7, 2020).*

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