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Searches and Seizures: Informants Police and prosecutors rely on informants to prosecute drug cases. These informants are often people busted for simple possession or small-time drug dealers who are forced to provide information in exchange for immunity or lesser sentences. Tips from anonymous informants are also utilized. This section provides the Court's perspective on the place the informant testimony occupies as the ground for a search or a seizure.
Court Opinions on the Topic:
[The record] does not tell us whether Office Davis made any effort to ascertain the informer's identity, his reason for calling, or the basis of his prediction about respondent's destination. Indeed, for all that this record tells us, the tipster may well have been another police officer who had a "hunch" that respondent might have cocaine in her attache' case.
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Anybody with enough knowledge about a given person to make her the target of a prank, or to harbor a grudge against her, will certainly be able to formulate a tip about her like the one predicting Vanessa White's excursion.
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...[U]nder the Court's holding, every citizen is subject to being seized and questioned by any officer who is prepared to testify that the warrantless stop was based on an anonymous tip predicting whatever conduct the officer just observed. Fortunately, the vast majority of those in our law enforcement community would not adopt such a practice. But the Fourth Amendment was intended to protect the citizen from the overzealous and unscrupulous officer as well as from those who are conscientious and truthful. This decision makes a mockery of that protection.
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