Cite as: 531 U. S. 32 (2000)
Opinion of the Court
Petitioners argue that our prior cases preclude an inquiry into the purposes of the checkpoint program. For example, they cite Whren v. United States, 517 U. S. 806 (1996), and Bond v. United States, 529 U. S. 334 (2000), to support the proposition that "where the government articulates and pursues a legitimate interest for a suspicionless stop, courts should not look behind that interest to determine whether the government's 'primary purpose' is valid." Brief for Petitioners 34; see also id., at 9. These cases, however, do not control the instant situation.
In Whren, we held that an individual officer's subjective intentions are irrelevant to the Fourth Amendment validity of a traffic stop that is justified objectively by probable cause to believe that a traffic violation has occurred. 517 U. S., at 810-813. We observed that our prior cases "foreclose any argument that the constitutional reasonableness of traffic stops depends on the actual motivations of the individual officers involved." Id., at 813. In so holding, we expressly distinguished cases where we had addressed the validity of searches conducted in the absence of probable cause. See id., at 811-812 (distinguishing Florida v. Wells, 495 U. S. 1, 4 (1990) (stating that "an inventory search must not be a ruse for a general rummaging in order to discover incriminating evidence"), Colorado v. Bertine, 479 U. S. 367, 372 (1987) (suggesting that the absence of bad faith and the lack of a purely investigative purpose were relevant to the validity of an inventory search), and Burger, 482 U. S., at 716-717, n. 27 (observing that a valid administrative inspection conducted with neither a warrant nor probable cause did not appear to be a pretext for gathering evidence of violations of the penal laws)).
Whren therefore reinforces the principle that, while "[s]ubjective intentions play no role in ordinary, probable-cause Fourth Amendment analysis," 517 U. S., at 813, programmatic purposes may be relevant to the validity of Fourth Amendment intrusions undertaken pursuant to a
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