I'm going to have to get into spoilers here, if that's okay.

SPOILERS

In the movie, a group of teenagers take a family hostage, after they accidentally shoot a cop in a house robbery. Bruce Willis is a cop who is given the task of hostage negotiator, and his own family are kidnapped by another group of criminals.

This group of criminals is worried that the police will find a DVD in the house that will incriminate them. But what I didn't get was, why were they worried? Just because a family is taken hostage, doesn't mean that the police will legally be given free rain to go through all of the families electronics, hoping to find something incriminating.

So why were they worried the police would find it?