BROWN, J.
The relevant facts follow. Nowling was on probation for two offenses. A written condition of probation was that: “[Y]our person, vehicle, home and all your property of any kind is subject to search and seizure. Any search or seizure procedures shall be conducted by the probation officer and/or his or her authorized agent and shall be reasonable under the circumstances.” Transcript at 63. Nowling’s probation officer, Jeff Skaggs, referred him to intensive outpatient drug and alcohol counseling, which he completed on January 21, 2010. In his discharge summary dated January 25, 2010, the counselor noted that Nowling “lives in la-la land,” which Skaggs believed meant that Nowling was “not being honest with [himself] about what’s going on . . . with [his] use or [his] amount of control [he has] to abstain” from using drugs, and the counselor recommended close supervision including home visits during evening hours. Id. at 89. The counselor also recommended that Nowling continue to abstain from drugs and alcohol. After Nowling’s discharge from treatment, Skaggs performed a risk assessment and determined that Nowling was a “high risk.” Id. at 94.
On February 26, 2010, Skaggs, accompanied by Indiana State Troopers Katrina Smith and Jackie Smith, whom Skaggs referred to as his “authorized agents,” conducted a home visit at a home owned by James Zimmerman, at which Nowling had resided with Zimmerman and Zimmerman’s daughter Gail Rikard, who was also Nowling’s fiancée, for about twelve years pursuant to an arrangement in which Rikard and Nowling helped take care of Zimmerman and run the household. Id. at 57. Trooper Jackie Smith was in full uniform and armed, and Trooper Katrina Smith was dressed in plain clothes and also armed. Upon arriving at the residence, they were greeted at the door by Zimmerman who asked them “to come in.” Id. at 120. Zimmerman informed Skaggs and the troopers that Nowling was not home but that he would be home shortly. Skaggs asked Zimmerman where Nowling‟s bedroom was, and Zimmerman replied that it was upstairs and “directed [Skaggs and the troopers] to the staircase.” Id. at 138. Skaggs and Trooper Katrina Smith then proceeded upstairs. Neither Skaggs nor the troopers asked Zimmerman for permission to search the home.
Upon entering Nowling’s bedroom, Trooper Katrina Smith and Skaggs noticed drug paraphernalia, including a white pen hull containing white powder, a plastic baggie with white residue in it, and aluminum foil sitting on a table. Trooper Katrina Smith also found an unloaded handgun in a dresser drawer.
. . . Test results later revealed that the white powder on the pen hull consisted of both cocaine and methamphetamine and the baggie contained cocaine residue.
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“[T]he United States Supreme Court has determined that ‘[a] State’s operation of a probation system . . . presents’ ‘special needs’ ‘beyond normal law enforcement that may justify departures from the usual warrant and probable-cause requirements.’” Micheau v. State, 893 N.E.2d 1053, 1059 (Ind. Ct. App. 2008) (quoting Allen v. State, 743 N.E.2d 1222, 1227 (Ind. Ct. App. 2001) (quoting Griffin v. Wisconsin, 483 U.S. 868, 873-74, 107 S. Ct. 3164 (1987)), reh’g denied, trans. denied), trans. denied. The Court held that these “’special needs’ . . . justified warrantless searches based on reasonable suspicion rather than probable cause.” State v. Schlechty, 926 N.E.2d 1, 3-4 (Ind. 2010) (citing Griffin, 483 N.E.2d at 875, 107 S. Ct. 3164), reh’g denied, cert. denied, 131 S. Ct. 934 (2011). Id. The Indiana Supreme Court, in examining Griffin, noted that whether the reasonableness requirement was established by statute or “by narrowly tailored restrictions included within a probation agreement,” warrantless probation searches “may be justified on the basis of reasonable suspicion to believe a probation violation has occurred because, among other things, supervision of probationers is necessary to ensure that probation restrictions are in fact observed, and that the community is not harmed by the probationer being at large.”2. at 4, 6.
[2We note that the Court in Schlechty also examined United States v. Knights, 534 U.S. 112, 122 S. Ct. 587 (2001), in which the United States Supreme Court “expanded its holding in Griffin by declaring that searches performed in compliance with a search provision contained within a valid probation agreement may be constitutional even if they were not ‘conducted by a probation officer monitoring whether the probationer is complying with probation restrictions.’” 926 N.E.2d at 4. In Knights, the probationer’s apartment was searched by a police detective without a warrant following “several acts of vandalism and arson” against a company which had recently “filed a complaint for theft of services” against the probationer and had terminated the probationer’s employment. Id. at 4 n.3. The probationer had agreed to a condition of probation which “provided for police access to his ‘person, property, place of residence, vehicle, personal effects, to search at anytime, with or without a search warrant, warrant for arrest or reasonable cause by any probation officer or law enforcement officer.’” Id. at 5. The issue as stated by the United States Supreme Court was “whether the Fourth Amendment limits searches pursuant to [Knights’s probation condition] to those with a ‘probationary’ purpose.” Knights, 534 U.S. at 116, 122 S. Ct. at 590. The Court held, as stated by the Schlechty Court, that “even if there is no probationary purpose at stake, a warrantless search may be justified on the basis of reasonable suspicion to believe that the probationer has engaged in criminal activity and that a search condition is one of the terms of probation,” Schlechty, 926 N.E.2d at 6, and it based its rationale on its “general Fourth Amendment approach of ‘examining the totality of the circumstances,’ with the probation search condition being a salient circumstance.” Knights, 534 U.S. at 118, 122 S. Ct. at 591 (citation omitted).
Under the circumstances of this case, which clearly involved a probationary search and in which there is no evidence that criminal activity had occurred prior to the search of Nowling’s bedroom, we need not examine whether the search was justified under the Knights test. Also, we need not address at this time the question of whether the Knights test would apply to a probationer such as Nowling where the search provision in the probation agreement provides explicitly that a search “shall be conducted by the probation officer and/or his or her authorized agent” and does not include law enforcement officers generally. Transcript at 63..
Finally, we also note that, to the extent that recent cases from this court state that “[w]hen a search is not conducted within the regulatory scheme of probation enforcement, a probationer’s normal privacy rights cannot be stripped from him,” that “[t]he State must demonstrate that a warrantless search of a probationer was a true probationary search and not an investigatory search,” and that “[a] probation search cannot be a mere subterfuge enabling the police to avoid obtaining a search warrant,” and setting forth a “bifurcated inquiry,” in which a court should first “determine whether the search was indeed a parole or probation search,” and, if it is determined that the search was “not conducted within the regulatory scheme of parole/probation enforcement, then it will be subject to the usual requirement that a warrant supported by probable cause be obtained,” such statements appear to conflict with the Indiana Supreme Court’ examination of Knights in Schlechty. See, e.g., Allen, 743 N.E.2d at 1227-1228. Indeed, the authority for these statements can be ultimately traced back to United States v. Ooley, 116 F.3d 370, 372 (9th Cir. 1997), cert. denied, 524 U.S. 963, 118 S. Ct. 2391 (1998), a case which was overruled by Knights. See, e.g., U.S. v. Stokes, 292 F.3d 964, 967 (9th Cir. 2002) (noting that the United States Supreme Court in Knights overruled Ooley and other cases holding that “searches of probationers [as being] invalid on the ground that they were subterfuges for criminal investigations”), cert. denied, 537 U.S. 964, 123 S. Ct. 398 (2002).]
In Schlechty, defendant Schlechty’s car was subjected to a warrantless search by a probation officer with the assistance of two other law enforcement officers following a report “that Schlechty was driving his car around a neighborhood: attempting to „pick up‟ a thirteen-year-old girl as she was on her way to a school bus stop . . . .” Id. at 2. The search “revealed a green leafy substance, later identified as marijuana, along with drug paraphernalia.” Id. The trial court granted Schlechty’s motion to suppress the evidence seized in the search, noting that there was no evidence presented to demonstrate that “there was reasonable suspicion that a search of [his] vehicle was necessary under the regulatory scheme of probation enforcement.” Id. at 2-3.
In reversing the trial court and concluding that the warrantless search of Schlechty’s car comported with the dictates of the Fourth Amendment, the Court discussed how the trial court “conflated” the distinct legal concepts of “’reasonableness’ of the search under the Fourth Amendment” and “’reasonable suspicion’ to support the search,” and it indicated that, although a search may be “reasonable,” it still may not have been based upon “reasonable suspicion.” Id. at 6-7. First, the Court noted that “all government searches, whether or not conducted pursuant to voluntary consent, must be ‘reasonable,’” and that “the Fourth Amendment would not condone the indiscriminate ransacking of a probationer’s home at all hours, or the pumping of his or her stomach, simply because a probation term included a search condition.” Id. Reasonable suspicion, by contrast, “is a less demanding standard than probable cause and requires a showing considerably less than preponderance of the evidence, but it still requires at least a minimal level of objective justification and more than an inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or ‘hunch’ of criminal activity.” Id. at 7. In evaluating reasonable suspicion, we are to measure “an officer’s subjective motivation for a search . . . against an objective standard of reasonableness.” Id. The Court held that “[t]he warrantless search of Schlechty’s car was supported both by reasonable suspicion to believe that Schlechty engaged in criminal activity [footnote omitted] and a search condition contained in his terms of probation. Also, the search itself was not conducted unreasonably.” Id. at 8.
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Based upon the facts before us, we find that Skaggs and the troopers did not have reasonable suspicion to believe that a probation violation had occurred. Viewed objectively, we can identify nothing in the record indicating that Nowling had been using drugs or had otherwise violated his probation, and we find that the bases cited by the State constitute nothing more than a “hunch.” Indeed, were we to find that Nowling’s status as a high-risk probationer and the vague statement that he “lives in la-la land” as being sufficiently particularized to support a finding of reasonable suspicion, such a determination would eviscerate the minimal Fourth Amendment privacy guarantees that Schlechty and Griffin afford Nowling and similarly-situated probationers. Thus, we conclude that the decision to enter and search Nowling’s bedroom was not supported by reasonable suspicion. Cf. Allen, 743 N.E.2d at 1229 (“When the police told [the probation officer] that Allen had been seen with a firearm, reasonable suspicion existed, and the probation search of Allen’s home was reasonable within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.”) (citing United States v. Lewis, 71 F.3d 358, 362 (10th Cir. 1995) (confidential informant’s tip, relayed to parole agent by police held sufficient to establish reasonable suspicion to support search of parolee’s residence); State v. Martinez, 811 P.2d 205, 210 (Utah Ct. App. 1991) (reasonable suspicion to search probationer’s apartment found where sheriff’s deputy contacted defendant’s probation officer concerning an alleged assault committed by defendant)); Purdy, 708 N.E.2d at 24 (holding that search was a valid probation search where police officer accompanied probation officer on a routine sweep of probationers home and searched defendant’s home only after he smelled marijuana smoke).
FRIEDLANDER, J., and BAILEY, J., concur.