42
Opinion of the Court
Ninth Circuit), we rejected an attempt to subdivide felony cases by accepting "mild exigency" for entry without property damage, but requiring "more specific inferences of exigency" before damage would be reasonable. 523 U. S., at 69-71 (internal quotation marks omitted). The Court of Appeals did not cite Ramirez.
Nor did the appeals court cite United States v. Arvizu, 534 U. S. 266 (2002) (again, from the Ninth Circuit). There, we recently disapproved a framework for making reasonable suspicion determinations that attempted to reduce what the Circuit described as "troubling . . . uncertainty" in reasonableness analysis, by "describ[ing] and clearly delimit[ing]" an officer's consideration of certain factors. Id., at 272, 275 (internal quotation marks omitted). Here, as in Arvizu, the Court of Appeals's overlay of a categorical scheme on the general reasonableness analysis threatens to distort the "totality of the circumstances" principle, by replacing a stress on revealing facts with resort to pigeonholes. Id., at 274 (internal quotation marks omitted). Attention to cocaine rocks and pianos tells a lot about the chances of their respective disposal and its bearing on reasonable time. Instructions couched in terms like "significant amount of time," and "an even more substantial amount of time," 282 F. 3d, at 704, tell very little.
V
Last, there is Banks's claim that the entry violated 18 U. S. C. § 3109. Ramirez held that the result should be the same under the Fourth Amendment and § 3109, permitting an officer to enter by force "if, after notice of his authority and purpose, he is refused admittance." We explained the statute's " 'requirement of prior notice . . . before forcing entry . . . [as] codif[ying] a tradition embedded in Anglo-American law,' " 523 U. S., at 72 (quoting Miller v. United States, 357 U. S. 301, 313 (1958)); see also Sabbath v. United States, 391 U. S. 585, 591, n. 8 (1968), and we held that § 3109 implicates the exceptions to the common law knock-and-
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