Cite as: 532 U. S. 318 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
extremely poor judgment. Atwater's claim to live free of pointless indignity and confinement clearly outweighs anything the City can raise against it specific to her case.
But we have traditionally recognized that a responsible Fourth Amendment balance is not well served by standards requiring sensitive, case-by-case determinations of government need, lest every discretionary judgment in the field be converted into an occasion for constitutional review. See, e. g., United States v. Robinson, 414 U. S. 218, 234-235 (1973). Often enough, the Fourth Amendment has to be applied on the spur (and in the heat) of the moment, and the object in implementing its command of reasonableness is to draw standards sufficiently clear and simple to be applied with a fair prospect of surviving judicial second-guessing months and years after an arrest or search is made. Courts attempting to strike a reasonable Fourth Amendment balance thus credit the government's side with an essential interest in readily administrable rules. See New York v. Belton, 453 U. S. 454, 458 (1981) (Fourth Amendment rules " 'ought to be expressed in terms that are readily applicable by the police in the context of the law enforcement activities in which they are necessarily engaged' " and not " 'qualified by all sorts of ifs, ands, and buts' ").16
At first glance, Atwater's argument may seem to respect the values of clarity and simplicity, so far as she claims that the Fourth Amendment generally forbids warrantless arrests for minor crimes not accompanied by violence or some
16 Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S. 1 (1968), upon which the dissent relies, see post, at 366, is not to the contrary. Terry certainly supports a more finely tuned approach to the Fourth Amendment when police act without the traditional justification that either a warrant (in the case of a search) or probable cause (in the case of arrest) provides; but at least in the absence of "extraordinary" circumstances, Whren v. United States, 517 U. S. 806, 818 (1996), there is no comparable cause for finicking when police act with such justification.
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