Can a police officer, in British Columbia, search your bag on public school grounds after hours?
The police need to have reasonable grounds that you are, or are about to commit a crime, or are in possession of evidence of a crime in order to search you. So the police need more than a hunch that you’re up to no good, and they need to tell you why they want to search you. It’s hard to say if they had sufficient grounds. In any event it sounds like you gave consent to the search. Simply trespassing is not enough reason to search your bag. It is enough reason for the police to detain and question you. If a court did find your rights were violated, that doesn’t mean the case is automatically dropped. The judge will need to decided if the evidence should be excluded. There are many cases where a judge finds a persons rights were violated but the case proceeds, because to exclude the evidence would cause questioning of the justice system.
