Atwater v. Lago Vista, 532 U.S. 318, 37 (2001)

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354

ATWATER v. LAGO VISTA

Opinion of the Court

for the development of a new and distinct body of constitutional law.

Accordingly, we confirm today what our prior cases have intimated: the standard of probable cause "applie[s] to all arrests, without the need to 'balance' the interests and circumstances involved in particular situations." Dunaway v. New York, 442 U. S. 200, 208 (1979). If an officer has probable cause to believe that an individual has committed even a very minor criminal offense in his presence, he may, without violating the Fourth Amendment, arrest the offender.

IV

Atwater's arrest satisfied constitutional requirements. There is no dispute that Officer Turek had probable cause to believe that Atwater had committed a crime in his presence. She admits that neither she nor her children were wearing seatbelts, as required by Tex. Transp. Code Ann. § 545.413 (1999). Turek was accordingly authorized (not required, but authorized) to make a custodial arrest without balancing costs and benefits or determining whether or not Atwater's arrest was in some sense necessary.

Nor was the arrest made in an "extraordinary manner, unusually harmful to [her] privacy or . . . physical interests." Whren v. United States, 517 U. S., at 818. As our citations in Whren make clear, the question whether a search or seizure is "extraordinary" turns, above all else, on the manner in which the search or seizure is executed. See ibid. (citing Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U. S. 1 (1985) ("seizure by means of deadly force"), Wilson v. Arkansas, 514 U. S. 927 (1995) ("unannounced entry into a home"), Welsh v. Wisconsin, 466 U. S. 740 (1984) ("entry into a home without a warrant"), and Winston v. Lee, 470 U. S. 753 (1985) ("physical penetration of the body")). Atwater's arrest was surely "humiliating," as she says in her brief, but it was no more "harmful to . . . privacy or . . . physical interests" than the normal custodial arrest. She was handcuffed, placed in a squad car, and

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