Introduction

Inventory Searches

Introduction

Warrantless searches are presumptively unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment, subject to a few well-delineated exceptions. Most of those exceptions rest on suspicion or emergency: probable cause that a car holds contraband, or the need to protect officers and preserve evidence at the scene of an arrest. The Amendment does not demand a warrant for every search, however. It demands that the search be reasonable.¹ The inventory search is a different kind of exception because it does not depend on suspicion of crime at all. Probable cause is a standard peculiarly related to criminal investigations, and a routine inventory is not conducted to investigate criminal activity.² It is an administrative, caretaking step that police take after they have lawfully taken a person into jail or a vehicle into custody, so that they can account for what they now hold.

Two questions run through this entire lesson. The first is whether the inventory was tied to a lawful custody event, meaning a valid arrest that brought the person and belongings to the station or a lawful impoundment that brought the vehicle to the police lot. The inventory follows the custody and cannot create it. The second is whether the officers followed standardized procedures in good faith, or instead used the inventory as a pretext for an evidence search. The second question matters because the caretaking purpose is what excuses the missing warrant and missing probable cause. An officer who opens containers at will and calls the result an inventory has taken a general power to search that the exception never granted.³

The Supreme Court first approved inventories of impounded vehicles in South Dakota v. Opperman, where marijuana turned up in the unlocked glove compartment of a towed truck during a routine inventory.⁴ Two later decisions build on that foundation. Illinois v. Lafayette holds that police may inventory an arrestee's belongings at the stationhouse before incarceration following a valid arrest.⁵ Colorado v. Bertine extends the same reasoning to an impounded vehicle, including the closed containers inside it, when the search follows standardized department procedures and is not a pretext for investigation.⁶ This lesson concerns when an inventory is valid, and it does not address every warrantless search of a car or an arrestee. Section 1 begins with the foundation, explaining why the law tolerates a search made with no warrant and no probable cause.