68
Opinion of the Court
and ensuing seizure that the Fourth Amendment by its reference to 'searches and seizures' seeks to regulate. Seizure means one thing when it is the outcome of a search; it may mean something else when it stands apart from a search or any other investigative activity. The Fourth Amendment may still nominally apply, but, precisely because there is no invasion of privacy, the usual rules do not apply." Id., at 1079 (emphasis in original).
We have difficulty with this passage. The court seemingly construes the Amendment to protect only against seizures that are the outcome of a search. But our cases are to the contrary and hold that seizures of property are subject to Fourth Amendment scrutiny even though no search within the meaning of the Amendment has taken place. See, e. g., Jacobsen, 466 U. S., at 120-125; Place, 462 U. S., at 706-707; Cardwell, 417 U. S., at 588-589.13 More generally, an officer who happens to come across an individual's property in a public area could seize it only if Fourth Amendment standards are satisfied—for example, if the items are evidence of a crime or contraband. Cf. Payton v. New York,
13 The officers in these cases were engaged in law enforcement and were looking for something that was found and seized. In this broad sense the seizures were the result of "searches," but not in the Fourth Amendment sense. That the Court of Appeals might have been suggesting that the plain-view cases are explainable because they almost always occur in the course of law enforcement activities receives some support from the penultimate sentence of the quoted passage, where the court states that the word "seizure" might lose its usual meaning "when it stands apart from a search or any other investigative activity." Id., at 1079 (emphasis added). And, in the following paragraph, it observes that "[o]utside of the law enforcement area the Fourth Amendment retains its force as a protection against searches, because they invade privacy. That is why we decline to confine the amendment to the law enforcement setting." Id., at 1079-1080. Even if the court meant that seizures of property in the course of law enforcement activities, whether civil or criminal, implicate interests safeguarded by the Fourth Amendment, but that pure property interests are unprotected in the non-law-enforcement setting, we are not in accord, as indicated in the body of this opinion.
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