It's completely legal for the police to make note of who enters a public storefront. It's also legal for the police to dig through your trash. Once it's place

It's completely legal for the police to make note of who enters a public storefront. It's also legal for the police to dig through your trash. Once it's placed on the curb to be picked up it's not your trash anymore, it's the city or county's trash, and they can do with it as they like. Evidence of illegal contraband in trash is almost by definition probable cause for a search warrant, and judges tend to be okay with handing out a few false positive warrants. Assuming that the police are professional and the citizens are cooperative, the damage is usually relatively minor. This seems to be less a case of rules failing and more a case of common sense breaking down. Wasting an officer's time someone's trash because you once saw them leave a gardening store isn't illegal, it's just a dumb waste of resources. And serving the resulting search warrant with a SWAT team is the kind of risk-averse cover-your-ass common sense violation that legal remedies tend to make worse instead of better.