We have recently held that "the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places," Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347, 351 (1967), and wherever an individual may harbor a reasonable "expectation of privacy," id., at 361 (MR. JUSTICE HARLAN, concurring), he is entitled to be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion. Of course, the specific content and incidents of this right must be shaped by the context in which it is asserted. For "what the Constitution forbids is not all searches and seizures, but unreasonable searches and seizures." Elkins v. United States, 364 U. S. 206, 222 (1960). Unquestionably petitioner was entitled to the protection of the Fourth Amendment as he walked down the street in Cleveland. Beck v. Ohio, 379 U. S. 89 (1964); Rios v. United States, 364 U. S. 253 (1960); Henry v. United States, 361 U. S. 98 (1959); United States v. Di Re, 332 U. S. 581 (1948); Carroll v. United States, 267 U. S. 132 (1925). The question is whether in all the circumstances of this on-the-street encounter, his right to personal security was violated by an unreasonable search and seizure.
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In this context we approach the issues in this case mindful of the limitations of the judicial function in controlling the myriad daily situations in which policemen and citizens confront each other on the street. The State has characterized the issue here as "the right of a police officer . . . to make an on-the-street stop, interrogate and pat down for weapons (known in street vernacular as `stop and frisk')."[8] But this is only partly accurate. For the issue is not the abstract propriety of the police conduct, but the admissibility against petitioner of the evidence uncovered by the search and seizure. Ever since its inception, the rule excluding evidence seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment has been recognized as a principal mode of discouraging lawless police conduct. See Weeks v. United States, 232 U. S. 383, 391-393 (1914). Thus its major thrust is a deterrent one, see Linkletter v. Walker, 381 U. S. 618, 629-635 (1965), and experience has taught that it is the only effective deterrent to police misconduct in the criminal context, and that without it the constitutional guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures would be a mere "form of words." Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U. S. 643, 655 (1961). The rule also serves another vital function—"the imperative of judicial integrity." Elkins 13*13 v. United States, 364 U. S. 206, 222 (1960). Courts which sit under our Constitution cannot and will not be made party to lawless invasions of the constitutional rights of citizens by permitting unhindered governmental use of the fruits of such invasions. Thus in our system evidentiary rulings provide the context in which the judicial process of inclusion and exclusion approves some conduct as comporting with constitutional guarantees and disapproves other actions by state agents. A ruling admitting evidence in a criminal trial, we recognize, has the necessary effect of legitimizing the conduct which produced the evidence, while an application of the exclusionary rule withholds the constitutional imprimatur.
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The danger in the logic which proceeds upon distinctions between a "stop" and an "arrest," or "seizure" of the person, and between a "frisk" and a "search" is two-fold. It seeks to isolate from constitutional scrutiny the initial stages of the contact between the policeman and the citizen. And by suggesting a rigid all-or-nothing model of justification and regulation under the Amendment, it obscures the utility of limitations upon the scope, as well as the initiation, of police action as a means of constitutional regulation.[15] This Court has held in 18*18 the past that a search which is reasonable at its inception may violate the Fourth Amendment by virtue of its intolerable intensity and scope. Kremen v. United States, 353 U. S. 346 (1957); Go-Bart Importing Co. v. 19*19 United States, 282 U. S. 344, 356-358 (1931); see United States v. Di Re, 332 U. S. 581, 586-587 (1948). The scope of the search must be "strictly tied to and justified by" the circumstances which rendered its initiation permissible. Warden v. Hayden, 387 U. S. 294, 310 (1967) (MR. JUSTICE FORTAS, concurring); see, e. g., Preston v. United States, 376 U. S. 364, 367-368 (1964); Agnello v. United States, 269 U. S. 20, 30-31 (1925).
The distinctions of classical "stop-and-frisk" theory thus serve to divert attention from the central inquiry under the Fourth Amendment—the reasonableness in all the circumstances of the particular governmental invasion of a citizen's personal security. "Search" and "seizure" are not talismans. We therefore reject the notions that the Fourth Amendment does not come into play at all as a limitation upon police conduct if the officers stop short of something called a "technical arrest" or a "full-blown search."
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Our evaluation of the proper balance that has to be struck in this type of case leads us to conclude that there must be a narrowly drawn authority to permit a reasonable search for weapons for the protection of the police officer, where he has reason to believe that he is dealing with an armed and dangerous individual, regardless of whether he has probable cause to arrest the individual for a crime. The officer need not be absolutely certain that the individual is armed; the issue is whether a reasonably prudent man in the circumstances would be warranted in the belief that his safety or that of others was in danger. Cf. Beck v. Ohio, 379 U. S. 89, 91 (1964); Brinegar v. United States, 338 U. S. 160, 174-176 (1949); Stacey v. Emery, 97 U. S. 642, 645 (1878).[23] And in determining whether the officer acted reasonably in such circumstances, due weight must be given, not to his inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or "hunch," but to the specific reasonable inferences which he is entitled to draw from the facts in light of his experience. Cf. Brinegar v. United States supra.
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The manner in which the seizure and search were conducted is, of course, as vital a part of the inquiry as whether they were warranted at all. The Fourth Amendment proceeds as much by limitations upon the 29*29 scope of governmental action as by imposing preconditions upon its initiation. Compare Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347, 354-356 (1967). The entire deterrent purpose of the rule excluding evidence seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment rests on the assumption that "limitations upon the fruit to be gathered tend to limit the quest itself." United States v. Poller, 43 F. 2d 911, 914 (C. A. 2d Cir. 1930); see, e. g., Linkletter v. Walker, 381 U. S. 618, 629-635 (1965); Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U. S. 643 (1961); Elkins v. United States, 364 U. S. 206, 216-221 (1960). Thus, evidence may not be introduced if it was discovered by means of a seizure and search which were not reasonably related in scope to the justification for their initiation. Warden v. Hayden, 387 U. S. 294, 310 (1967) (MR. JUSTICE FORTAS, concurring).
FN [12] In this case, for example, the Ohio Court of Appeals stated that "we must be careful to distinguish that the `frisk' authorized herein includes only a `frisk' for a dangerous weapon. It by no means authorizes a search for contraband, evidentiary material, or anything else in the absence of reasonable grounds to arrest. Such a search is controlled by the requirements of the Fourth Amendment, and probable cause is essential." State v. Terry, 5 Ohio App. 2d 122, 130, 214 N. E. 2d 114, 120 (1966). See also, e. g., Ellis v. United States, 105 U. S. App. D. C. 86, 88, 264 F. 2d 372, 374 (1959); Comment, 65 Col. L. Rev. 848, 860, and n. 81 (1965).
While arrests are subject to Fourth Amendment requirements, courts have followed the common law in upholding the authority of police officers to take a person into custody without a warrant if they have probable cause to believe the person has committed a felony or a misdemeanor in their presence.1 Probable cause must be satisfied by conditions existing prior to the arrest and cannot be established retroactively.2 There are, however, instances when a person’s conduct or manner arouse a police officer’s suspicions, but probable cause to arrest such a person is lacking.3 In its 1968 Terry v. Ohio decision,4 the Court, with only Justice Douglas dissenting, approved a police officer’s on-the-street investigation that involved patting down the subject of the investigation for weapons.
Terry arose when a police officer observed three individuals engaging in conduct that appeared to him, on the basis of training and experience, to be casing a store for a likely armed robbery. Upon approaching the men, identifying himself, and not receiving prompt identification, the officer seized one of the men, patted the exterior of his clothes, and discovered a gun. For the Court, Chief Justice Warren wrote that the Fourth Amendment applies whenever a police officer accosts an individual and restrains his freedom to walk away.5 Because the warrant clause is necessarily and practically of no application to the type of on-the-street encounter present in Terry, the Chief Justice considered whether the policeman’s actions were reasonable. The Chief Justice reasoned that the test of reasonableness in this sort of situation is whether the police officer can point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, would lead a neutral magistrate on review to conclude that a man of reasonable caution would be warranted in believing that possible criminal behavior was at hand and that both an investigative stop and a frisk was required.6 Because the police officer witnessed conduct that reasonably led him to believe that an armed robbery was in prospect, he was as reasonably led to believe that the men were armed and probably dangerous and that his safety required a frisk. Because the object of a frisk is to discover dangerous weapons, it must therefore be confined in scope to an intrusion reasonably designed to discover guns, knives, clubs, or other hidden instruments for the assault of the police officer.7
In a later case, the Court held that an officer may seize an object if, in the course of a weapons frisk, plain touch reveals the presence of the object, and the officer has probable cause to believe it is contraband.8 The Court viewed the situation as analogous to that covered by the plain view doctrine: obvious contraband may be seized, but a search may not be expanded to determine whether an object is contraband.9 Also impermissible is physical manipulation, without reasonable suspicion, of a bus passenger’s carry-on luggage stored in an overhead compartment.10
Terry did not address the grounds that could permissibly lead an officer to stop a person on the street or elsewhere in order to ask questions rather than frisk for weapons, the right of the stopped individual to refuse to cooperate, and the permissible response of the police to that refusal. The Court provided a partial answer in its 2004 decision, Hiibel v. Sixth Judical District Court, when it upheld a state law that required a suspect to disclose his name in the course of a valid Terry stop.11 Questions about a suspect's identity are a routine and accepted part of many Terry stops, the Court explained.12
After Terry, the standard for stops for investigative purposes evolved into one of reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. That test permits some stops and questioning without probable cause in order to allow police officers to explore the foundations of their suspicions.13 Although it did not elaborate a set of rules to govern applying the tests, the Court was initially restrictive in recognizing permissible bases for reasonable suspicion.14 The Court invalidated extensive intrusions on individual privacy, e.g., transporting a person to the station house for interrogation and fingerprinting, absent probable cause,15 and the Court has held that an uncorroborated, anonymous tip is an insufficient basis for a Terry stop, and that there is no firearms exception to the reasonable suspicion requirement.16 Since the 1980s, however, the Court has taken less restrictive approaches.17
The Court's approach for when a seizure has occurred for Fourth Amendment purposes has evolved. The Terry Court recognized in dictum that not all personal intercourse between policemen and citizens involves ‘seizures’ of persons, and suggested that [o]nly when the officer, by means of physical force or show of authority, has in some way restrained the liberty of a citizen may we conclude that a ‘seizure’ has occurred.18 In the 1980 United States v. Mendenhall decision, Justice Stewart, joined by Justice Rehnquist, proposed a similar standard—that a person has been seized only if, in view of all of the circumstances surrounding the incident, a reasonable person would have believed that he was not free to leave.19 A majority of the Justices subsequently endorsed this reasonable perception standard20 and applied it in several later cases in which the admissibility of evidence turned on whether police actions prior to uncovering evidence violated the Fourth Amendment. No seizure occurred, for example, when INS agents seeking to identify unlawfully present aliens conducted workforce surveys within a garment factory; while some agents were positioned at exits, others systematically moved through the factory and questioned employees.21 The Court held this brief questioning, even with blocked exits, amounted to classic consensual encounters rather than Fourth Amendment seizures.22 The Court has also ruled that no seizure occurred when police in a squad car drove alongside a suspect who had turned and run down the sidewalk when he saw the squad car approach. Under the circumstances (no siren, flashing lights, display of a weapon, or blocking of the suspect’s path), the Court concluded the police conduct would not have communicated to the reasonable person an attempt to capture or otherwise intrude upon [one’s] freedom of movement.23
The Court later ruled that the Mendenhall free-to-leave inquiry was misplaced in the context of a police sweep of a bus, but that a modified reasonable perception approach still governed.24 In conducting a bus sweep aimed at detecting illegal drugs and their couriers, police officers typically board a bus during a stopover at a terminal and ask to inspect tickets, identification, and at times, the luggage of selected passengers. The Court did not focus on whether an arrest had taken place, but instead suggested that the appropriate inquiry is whether a reasonable person would feel free to decline the officers’ requests or otherwise terminate the encounter.25 When the person is seated on a bus and has no desire to leave, the Court explained, the degree to which a reasonable person would feel that he or she could leave is not an accurate measure of the coercive effect of the encounter.26
The Supreme Court’s analysis of seizure, however, is different in the context of fleeing suspects, where the Court seemingly applies a more formalistic approach than the Mendenhall reasonable-perception standard. In Brower v. County of Inyo, the Supreme Court concluded that a seizure occurred when a suspect’s car collided with a police roadblock, and explained that a [v]iolation of the Fourth Amendment requires an intentional acquisition of physical control.27 The Court reasoned that such a use of force becomes a seizure only when there is a governmental termination of freedom of movement through means intentionally applied.28 The Court seemingly modified that standard in California v. Hodari D., another Fourth Amendment case involving a fleeing suspect.29 In Hodari D., the Court held that an actual chase with evident intent to capture did not amount to a seizure because the suspect had not complied with the officer’s order to halt. The Court reasoned that Mendenhall stated a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a seizure of the person is through a show of authority.30 A Fourth Amendment seizure of the person, the Court determined, is the same as a common law arrest; there must be either application of physical force (or the laying on of hands), or submission to the assertion of authority.31 Three decades after Hodari D., the Court revisited the nature of seizure in the context of a fleeing suspect in its 2021 Torres v. Madrid decision.32 In Torres, the Court held that a suspect was seized when struck twice by bullets fired by law enforcement, even though she temporarily evaded capture.33 The Court reasoned that the application of physical force to the body of a person with intent to restrain is a seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, even if the force does not succeed in subduing the person.34 According to the Court, such a seizure lasts only as long as the application of force.35 Thus, in Torres, officers seized the suspect the instant that the bullets struck her.36 The Court clarified that, unlike seizure by application of force, seizure by show of authority still requires either voluntary submission or termination of freedom of movement.37
A Terry search need not be limited to a stop and frisk of the person, but may extend as well to a protective search of the passenger compartment of a car if an officer possesses “a reasonable belief, based on specific and articulable facts . . . that the suspect is dangerous and . . . may gain immediate control of weapons.” 1 How lengthy a Terry detention may be varies with the circumstances. In approving a 20-minute detention of a driver made necessary by the driver’s own evasion of drug agents and a state police decision to hold the driver until the agents could arrive on the scene, the Court indicated that it is “appropriate to examine whether the police diligently pursued a means of investigation that was likely to confirm or dispel their suspicions quickly, during which time it was necessary to detain the defendant.” 2
Similar principles govern detention of luggage at airports in order to detect the presence of drugs;Terry “limitations applicable to investigative detentions of the person should define the permissible scope of an investigative detention of the person’s luggage on less than probable cause.” 3 The general rule is that “when an officer’s observations lead him reasonably to believe that a traveler is carrying luggage that contains narcotics, the principles of Terry . . . would permit the officer to detain the luggage briefly to investigate the circumstances that aroused his suspicion, provided that the investigative detention is properly limited in scope.” 4 Seizure of luggage for an expeditious “canine sniff” by a dog trained to detect narcotics can satisfy this test even though seizure of luggage is in effect detention of the traveler, since the procedure results in “limited disclosure,” impinges only slightly on a traveler’s privacy interest in the contents of personal luggage, and does not constitute a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.5 (a canine sniff around the perimeter of a car following a routine traffic stop does not offend the Fourth Amendment if the duration of the stop is justified by the traffic offense) with Rodriguez v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 1609, 1613, 1614–15 (2015) (finding that the stop in question had been prolonged for seven to eight minutes beyond the time needed to resolve the traffic offense in order to conduct a canine sniff). By contrast, taking a suspect to an interrogation room on grounds short of probable cause, retaining his air ticket, and retrieving his luggage without his permission taints consent given under such circumstances to open the luggage, since by then the detention had exceeded the bounds of a permissible Terry investigative stop and amounted to an invalid arrest.6 But the same requirements for brevity of detention and limited scope of investigation are apparently inapplicable to border searches of international travelers, the Court having approved a 24-hour detention of a traveler suspected of smuggling drugs in her alimentary canal.7
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Footnotes 1 Michigan v. Long, 463 U.S. 1032 (1983) (suspect appeared to be under the influence of drugs, officer spied hunting knife exposed on floor of front seat and searched remainder of passenger compartment). Similar reasoning has been applied to uphold a “protective sweep” of a home in which an arrest is made if arresting officers have a reasonable belief that the area swept may harbor another individual posing a danger to the officers or to others. Maryland v. Buie, 494 U.S. 325 (1990). , 2 United States v. Sharpe, 470 U.S. 675, 686 (1985). A more relaxed standard has been applied to detention of travelers at the border, the Court testing the reasonableness in terms of “the period of time necessary to either verify or dispel the suspicion.” United States v. Montoya de Hernandez, 473 U.S. 531, 544 (1985) (approving warrantless detention for more than 24 hours of traveler suspected of alimentary canal drug smuggling). , 3 United States v. Place, 462 U.S. 696, 709 (1983). 4 462 U.S. at 706. , , 5 462 U.S. at 707. However, the search in Place was not expeditious, and hence exceeded Fourth Amendment bounds, when agents took 90 minutes to transport luggage to another airport for administration of the canine sniff. The length of a detention short of an arrest has similarly been a factor in other cases. Compare Illinois v. Caballes, 543 U.S. 405 (2005) (a canine sniff around the perimeter of a car following a routine traffic stop does not offend the Fourth Amendment if the duration of the stop is justified by the traffic offense) with Rodriguez v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 1609, 1613, 1614–15 (2015) (finding that the stop in question had been prolonged for seven to eight minutes beyond the time needed to resolve the traffic offense in order to conduct a canine sniff). , 6 Florida v. Royer, 460 U.S. 491 (1983). On this much the plurality opinion of Justice White (id. at 503), joined by three other Justices, and the concurring opinion of Justice Brennan (id. at 509) were in agreement. , 7 United States v. Montoya de Hernandez, 473 U.S. 531 (1985). |