374
Souter, J., dissenting
parolee's apartment); see also Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole, Police Procedures in the Handling of Parolees 16 (rev. 1974) (parole agent has a responsibility to inform police in the area where parolee will be living and to provide "full cooperation to the police").
As these cases show, the police very likely do know a parolee's status when they go after him, and (contrary to the majority's assumption) this fact is significant for three reasons. First, and most obviously, the police have reason for concern with the outcome of a parole revocation proceeding, which is just as foreseeable as the criminal trial and at least as likely to be held. Police officers, especially those employed by the same sovereign that runs the parole system, therefore have every incentive not to jeopardize a recommitment by rendering evidence inadmissible. See INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U. S., at 1043 (deterrence especially effective when law enforcement and prosecution are under one government). Second, as I will explain below, the actual likelihood of trial is often far less than the probability of a petition for parole revocation, with the consequence that the revocation hearing will be the only forum in which the evidence will ever be offered. Often, therefore, there will be nothing incremental about the significance of evidence offered in the administrative tribunal, and nothing "marginal" about the deterrence provided by an exclusionary rule operating there. Ante, at 368. Finally, the cooperation between parole and police officers, as in the instances shown in the cases cited above, casts serious doubt upon the aptness of treating police officers differently from parole officers, doubt that is confirmed by the following attention to the Court's characterization of the position of the parole officer.
The Court recalls our description of the police as "engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime," which raises the temptation to cut constitutional corners (which in turn requires the countervailing influence of the exclusionary rule). United States v. Leon, 468 U. S., at 914.
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