44
Opinion of the Court
The primary purpose of the Indianapolis narcotics checkpoints is in the end to advance "the general interest in crime control," Prouse, 440 U. S., at 659, n. 18. We decline to suspend the usual requirement of individualized suspicion where the police seek to employ a checkpoint primarily for the ordinary enterprise of investigating crimes. We cannot sanction stops justified only by the generalized and ever-present possibility that interrogation and inspection may reveal that any given motorist has committed some crime.
Of course, there are circumstances that may justify a law enforcement checkpoint where the primary purpose would otherwise, but for some emergency, relate to ordinary crime control. For example, as the Court of Appeals noted, the Fourth Amendment would almost certainly permit an appropriately tailored roadblock set up to thwart an imminent terrorist attack or to catch a dangerous criminal who is likely to flee by way of a particular route. See 183 F. 3d, at 662- 663. The exigencies created by these scenarios are far removed from the circumstances under which authorities might simply stop cars as a matter of course to see if there just happens to be a felon leaving the jurisdiction. While we do not limit the purposes that may justify a checkpoint program to any rigid set of categories, we decline to approve a program whose primary purpose is ultimately indistinguishable from the general interest in crime control.1
1 The Chief Justice's dissent erroneously characterizes our opinion as resting on the application of a "non-law-enforcement primary purpose test." Post, at 53. Our opinion nowhere describes the purposes of the Sitz and Martinez-Fuerte checkpoints as being "not primarily related to criminal law enforcement." Post, at 50. Rather, our judgment turns on the fact that the primary purpose of the Indianapolis checkpoints is to advance the general interest in crime control.
The Chief Justice's dissent also erroneously characterizes our opinion as holding that the "use of a drug-sniffing dog . . . annuls what is otherwise plainly constitutional under our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence." Post, at 48. Again, the constitutional defect of the program is that its primary purpose is to advance the general interest in crime control.
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