If the police want to enter your home, they can always ask for your consent. But you don’t have to provide it to them. You can absolutely deny their request to come into your house.
If you do so, then the police may execute a search warrant. This warrant is issued by a judge, and it gives them the legal ability to come into your house, with or without consent. The warrant should be fairly specific in instructing them about when they can enter the home, where they are supposed to look, and what type of evidence they are looking for.
But there are also cases where the police may want to come into your house in an emergency, when there is no time to get a warrant. Can they do so?
Exigent circumstances
Yes, they can often do this in emergency situations. If there are exigent circumstances, the officer can use their discretion to decide if they need to enter the house immediately or not.
One example of this is if the police believe there’s a danger to the public, such as someone in the home with a firearm. They could also enter the house if they were in hot pursuit of a suspect who ran inside and there’s no time to get a warrant from a judge while still making the arrest.
That being said, if the police do enter a home in an emergency situation, it can affect the case. They have to show that it was justified in court, or else it may have been an illegal search. This would mean that evidence gathered during the search would be excluded from the court case. As such, if you are facing serious criminal charges, it’s very important for you to know what steps to take.