When serving a felony arrest warrant, at a suspects home, you may force entry provided you have given knock and notice. Plus you have cause to believe the suspect is actually inside.

How about when there is some type of locked perimeter fencing? Is cutting the lock off a perimeter gate, so you can get to the front door for knock and notice "forced entry?"

No.  The Knock and Announce is for the residence.  There are plenty of times on a forced entry warrant that you may have to cut a lock, cut a fence, or pull iron gates off to be able to approach the door.

"Knock and notice" requirements normally don't apply to exterior gates and fences, at least where they are not an integral part of the dwelling itself, and there is no one present in the yard, there is no bell or buzzer, intercom or other means of contacting the occupants of the dwelling and there is no purpose in attempting to comply until reaching the actual residence.  ( POLS 3.22)

IIRC caselaw supports any means of forcible entry to the property where the dwelling is located to facilitate the requirements of knock and notice/officer safety before entry.  
NorCal

Quoted: No.  The Knock and Announce is for the residence.  There are plenty of times on a forced entry warrant that you may have to cut a lock, cut a fence, or pull iron gates off to be able to approach the door.

That's what I thought. However last night, we had to cut a padlock off a gate, to get to the residence. We then knocked and waited as required by CPC 844, suspect did not come to the door and instead we could hear the suspect running away from the door. So we forced entry into the residence to serve the felony arrest warrant.


Some of the old timers are *convinced* that cutting the padlock of the perimeter gate made it an unlawfull entry. Even though we knocked and noticed before forcing entry into the res.

well... if putting a pad locked fence around your house kept us from serving felony warrants, I think we'd be finding a lot more fences how bout you guys?

THE K&A has to be doen on the outermost point of entry to the residence.  For example, knocking on the wooden door of a house after passing through the screened-in front porch has been held to equal an invalid K&A.  According to the judge, the K&A should have been done on the porch door itself.   ALso, you can't enter an attached garage, then do the K&A on the door leading from the garage into the residence.